Common Sense in the GOP’s “Pledge”?

Children can’t vote.
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The average age of a Rush Limbaugh listener is 67. The average age for a Fox News watcher is 65.
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Did you really need to ask this question?

To quote Sullivan: (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/09/the-fisc.html)

“Given the gravity of the debt crisis, this is the most fiscally irresponsible document ever offered by the GOP. It is to the far right of Reagan, who raised taxes and eventually cut defense, and helped reform social security to ensure its longterm viability. It is an act of vandalism against the fiscal balance of the US, and in this global economic climate, a recipe for a double-dip recession and default. It is the opposite of responsible conservatism.”

Thank you!

And I’d agree I’d like some answers to these questions as well. I have some guesses, but they are just that: assumptions backed up by neither fact nor evidence.

If you find out more please let us know. I’d like to know what republican “common sense” is before I vote in November.

Well the republicans voted against a pay raise for the troops two days ago so maybe they are tightening their belts.
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At the expense of brave fighting men and women but I suppose they need to start somewhere.

Here’s some more common-sense conservatism from Sharron Angle — we need to get insurance plans to stop covering maternity leaves and autism. (I’m sorry, I should have put autism in scare quotes like she did. “Autism.”)

“Why does the new House Republican campaign platform’s call for immediate discretionary spending cuts feature a clause promising “common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans and our troops”?
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Because the Democrats would use it against them for the November election if these exceptions were were not included.
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Simple right.

Michael,
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You don’t suppose that this “pledge” is nothing more than a political PR stunt, do you?
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That, in the end, NONE of the “sacred cows” for Wall Street (or the GOP “base”) will be touched in any meaningful way…
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It DOES seem to have enough “loopholes” and exceptions to drive an MIC through.

And how exactly was passing a nearly ONE TRILLION dollar stimulus package anything but stimulus? Does that make and sense at all? Was it a prudent action or did it make a lick of common sense?
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The only thing Obama’s stimulus did was increase our National Debt from 12 Trillion dollars to now almost 14 Trillion dollars.
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What resulted, unemployment STILL at or near 10% in most States in this country. Actual unemployment is well over 16% in most places. And there is no end of this recession in sight.
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Good job libtards. We always knew you could screw things up royally.

I think your statement that “quite a few American seniors retire into affluence” could use a little fact checking. Granted, the use of the phrase “quite a few” gives you a lot of leeway but…

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/olderstats.htm

10% of households 65 or older were in poverty in 2003 and those were better times economically.

The Median household income for people 65 and older was just over $100,000 at the time. Sounds like a lot but that’s not really much to live 30 more years on and the vast majority of these households are retired.

We’re still talking here, about a generation with corporate pensions, which are going away.

I think you really have to be careful about selling comfortable retirement as a given in America.

Easily explained.
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http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75427/sharron-angle-and-the-scientologists

That’s an excellent point.
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Of course “quite a few American seniors retire into affluence” likely means “quite a few American seniors I know from my circle retire into affluence”

I think you really have to be careful about selling comfortable retirement as a given in America.
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Especially after the big Wall Street “nosedive” a couple of years back. I had an investment account that lost about a third of its value just over a few months. Right now, it’s just sorta bobbing up and down, rather than growing.
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Being retired military, I’m aware I’m MUCH better off than many.
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And I’M worried…

While I’m sure that was tounge in cheek, lets not forget the reason they voted against that: A repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and a chance for immigrants to serve our country, educate themselves and then become citizens.

Well sure, screwing the fighting men and women was just gravy for them.
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It is just more BS

“The Median household income for people 65 and older was just over $100,000 at the time.’
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Did you mean “Median Household Net Worth” perhaps, destor?

@kbanginmotown: I did. Nice catch. Thanks.

She’s an idiot. She wants to get rid of the reason we all have insurance. The whole idea behind insurance is that a mass of people collectively pay into a fund that will cover the few individuals that get sick. Yes, that means paying for autistic kids too. Bringing more people into the insurance market theoretically helps offset the cost of the increased range of illnesses that are covered, assuming that the insurance companies aren’t gouging us while all of this is going into effect.

So what the Republicans are promising is not reform but “Democratic Lite”.

I thought with the Tea Party, we were seeing a groundwell where people were tired of government spending and they wanted to see real reform. What the Republicans are promising is more of the same.

The Republicans have promised to protect entitlements. Well, if you are going to protect entitlements, how are you going to cut spending? Please spare telling me you will cut government waste and pork. Every politician promises to reign in waste and pork.

It would be nice if the Republicans would offer real reform instead of telling people what they want to hear. For all of the Tea Party’s claim about representing ordinary Americans, it seems like ordinary Americans don’t want to see their Social Security touched. Talk about Socialism and Wealth Transfer. We take tax money from young workers, who usually have no assets and give them to our Elders, who tend to have more wealth than our young workers. Talk about Socialism! Yet, this is the third rail of politics.

Well, I can take some hope that they didn’t mention any social issues.

“And how exactly was passing a nearly ONE TRILLION dollar stimulus package anything but stimulus? Does that make and sense at all?”
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Rusty, your comment does not make and sense at all.
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You should at least proofread before calling people ‘libtards’. Otherwise, you might look foolish.

You wrote: “As for ‘our troops’: Certainly no one is going to deny them, say, body armor or the best weapons available for the threats they face.”
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Don’t you read newspapers? Bush-Rumsfeld did just that in their misguided effort to fight two wars on the cheap (or, more to the point, on the charge card). Lives were lost as a result.

“She wants to get rid of the reason we all have insurance. The whole idea behind insurance is that a mass of people collectively pay into a fund that will cover the few individuals that get sick”
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But, but, but, but – it takes away my induvidual right to just have it covering me. I don’t want to pay for a insurance policy that also helps others…let them find their own policy. (channeling my inner irrational being).
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This is the best the right can offer. These are not common sense, average people and woes. This is the fringe; don’t know nuances of issues just red meat and anger. In Sharon’s perfect world everything work by magic; whatever little pittance she want to pay someone for will give her perfect infrastructure and stop people from getting hurt, sick or property from getting damaged. And when that happens; it’s your fault.

Thirty days ago, the deficit was all the Republicants could rant and scream about and now they want to add another $3 trillion (that’s with a “T”) to it with extension of the tax cuts, even on investments. That at least confirms that the rich will now pay an effective rate one-half that of the local teacher, plumber, or street worker. That is certainly a worthwhile goal to keep the Koch’s, Walton’s, Stephen’s and friends in cavier while you search for a job!

There are some very short memories or maybe we are showing the real issues of American education when people believe everything they are told with thinking to check for themselves. A country of lemmings led by FAUX, Beck, and Rushmouth!

Common sense anywhere in the Democrat Party…hello.

Nope.

Common sense? Please define. On second thought, don’t. Never mind.

On another post today, I challenged the reporter to question TP candidates and other reactionary Rep lawmakers if they agreed with this insanity.
Someone needs to define the basics of insurance to Angle.

I’m in moderation for posting a comment with 6 links. The site has been letting comments through with more than 1 link for awhile. I guess 6 was too much. I know it will take days, if ever, for the high sheriffs to review.
I don’t feel like doing a new post with individual or double links.
My comment was a compilation of remarks by liberal, center, and conservative writers about the lameness of the Rep plan.
Most can be found at the Daily Dish.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

Did you know that “small business”, as defined and supported by Republicans includes Bechtel, Coors, the Koch Brother’s enterprises, Carlyle Group and others? These are 97% of the business beneficiaries from the Bush tax cut.
They file as S corporations and therefore are classified the same as a mom and pop grocery store.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/9/23/904477/-Small-Business
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I feel their pain.

This document sounds like GOP pledge to a Democratic majority for the next 100 years.
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I, for one, will be praying for a GOP takeover of both the house and senate in November.

apr, I take it you saw Olbermann last night?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#39316659
Naturally, we don’t see Chris Matthews or Campbell Brown dig up stuff like this. Maybe next time Jay Newton-Small appears on Tweety’s show she should literally kick him in the head on the air for faux-balanced shouting matches instead of investigative stuff.

liberalmeltdown, you and your ilk (Newfreedog,freepy et al) are mere caricatures of a conservative/libertarian minded person.
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Why do I say that? Because you seem to lack something that differentiate humans from farm animals – critical thinking and original thought. It seems as if Fox News plants these wierd ideas into your head (“Inception” anyone?) and you keep repeating them like a mindless drone.
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I know you get some of your libertarian “free market utopian” ideas from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. I am a great admirer of Ayn Rand, but I have a mind of my own to realize that her book is a work of fiction and some of her ideas will not work in the real world. Go read her first novel “Fountainhead”. Maybe that will help you understand what critical thinking and orginal thought are all about.

This was unbearably offensive. I have two nephews with autism. Medicaid happens to pay for the majority of their treatment and they attend school at one of this country’s most experienced, most advanced facility for autism.

Right back atcha Maverick.

Maverick, when I read the same old tired failed liberal fantasies posted here by you and your ilk, I wonder why some people never grow up. I am amazed that the history of the Socialist State’s failures doesn’t register with them. That even in the last few months we have seen Socialist States at the verge of bankruptcy, but you still don’t get it. So, I am reminded of the fantasy world that you live in, where you fantasize that you will have different results THIS time, because you care more (that’s only in your own fantasy world of course). I’ll refer you to the article below:

Why has liberalism failed?

I think the reason is that liberalism stands for fantasy in politics, whereas conservatism stands for imagination. In the short run, fantasy prevails; but imagination will have the last word.

We usually confuse imagination with fantasy. But this is a mistake. The two things are nearly opposites; or rather they are related to each other as youth is related to adulthood.

A daydream is fantasy, a flight from reality, a wishful and superficial series of images; just as socialism is a fantasy, a dream of a world divorced from nature. It is easy to fantasize a world in which all men are brothers and share their possessions unselfishly; it is more difficult to explain why such a world can never be. Shallow people call the pursuit of such fantasies “idealism.”

Unlike fantasy, real imagination explores reality and possibility. You can’t separate it from the intellect. It takes imagination to see the world as it is, to understand people as they are, to grasp the remote implications of ideas, to foresee the results of various courses of action, to perceive abstract relations, to find analogies, to view a single truth from many angles, to sort out the essential from the inessential.

The Iliad and King Lear tell stories with little or no basis in what we call fact; but they are works of imagination, not fantasy. They have a powerful internal logic that fantasy lacks. That is why we speak of their “imaginative truth” (not “fantastic truth”).

Fantasy is bold and passionate; imagination is more cautionary and objective. The youth who wants to rush headlong into a project may be inspired by a dream; but his father, who cautions him against it out of his own experience, may actually be more imaginative, in the sense of being more capable of imagining the real outcome. Imagination is a mode of seeing and knowing; fantasy is usually blind.

Fantasy has its place, and the youth may be right when his father is wrong. We need our dreams, provided we remember that they are, after all, only dreams. And of course there is such a thing as excessive caution. Besides, to idealize the past, as conservatives sometimes do, is only another kind of fantasy. But as a general matter experience enriches the imagination, and we disregard it at our peril.

“I dream of things as they never were, and ask, Why not?” said Bernard Shaw, a socialist. We can now see that the failure of socialism was precisely a failure of imagination, because it was a triumph of fantasy. The socialists failed to imagine everything that actually happened when their scheme was imposed on intractable reality.

It was the realists — preeminently a few prophetic men like Ludwig von Mises — who had the imagination to know in advance why socialism would fail. They were even accused of cynicism for rejecting the fantasy. In a supreme delusion, fantasy became a moral test which any sane man was bound to flunk.

You might even say that in our time fantasy has managed to keep imagination on the defensive. In democratic politics, fantasy always has a natural advantage, because everyone can fantasize but few can imagine. The fallacy is fun; the refutation is heavy lifting. The world is perpetually easier to seduce than to persuade.

Liberalism, our watered-down piecemeal version of socialism, still relies on a rhetoric of fantasy — and self-righteous fantasy at that. The liberal proposes his dream of, say, national health care; and then he reviles as “inhumane” and “lacking compassion” those who assume the burden of imagining the real consequences.

When, amid the ruins, one side says to the other, “I told you so,” that’s imagination rebuking fantasy. Using the imagination can be a hard and thankless task. And conservatives often fail in imagination when it is most needed. Sometimes they have nothing more than the stubborn intuition that the liberal fantasy is overlooking something they can’t specify. But even then they are usually right.

But fantasizing is always easy — fatally easy. The world is often short on foresight, but it never runs out of dreams. We should enjoy our dreams without being tyrannized by them.

Joseph Sobran

By the way, how’s that anti-Christ gig working out for ya?

Since Huckabbe likes to compare health insurance to property and car insurance, perhaps he an Angle have a problem with people carrying that insurance when they might never need it.
What a bunch of goobers.
And yes, anyone with autism in their family should be insulted. Her quotation marks hand gestures gave us a good idea of her respect for those families.

decon: Yes, it was a great show. Olbermann and Maddow in particular do some great investigative reporting.

maverick: Do you really think the reactionaries that post on this site actually read real books. Oh, I am sure they read the lasted tomes by Beck, O’Reilly, Coulter, etc. Anything deeper, I have a feeling, would be too difficult or they would consider them left wing, socialist screeds.
Can you see them reading Steinbeck, Falkner, Salinger, Hemingway, Harper Lee, Mailer, etc?

Why has liberalism failed?
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Joseph Sobran

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Sigh..I said “critical thinking” and “original thought”. I might as well have gone and listened to some sheep bleating – because the words you have regurgitated here were just as enlightening.
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Is there a single liberal here who has never been critical of democratic leaders/politicians including Obama? That is because we think for ourselves and don’t need a drip feed of talking/thinking points from some liberal blog/news media. I wish I could say the same about the wingnuts here.
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PS: About Summers being a self-confessed liberal, I said his actions speaks louder than his words. Sadly, I think you completely “mis-underestimated” me.

Well put, liberalmeltdown and for most of us, easily understood. For maverick and many of his fellow progressives, this sudden ray of perception is simply overwhelming. They much prefer the liberal world of opaqueness and grow quickly irascible when disturbed from their deep slumber. Excellent effort on your part, too bad it was wasted on a closed mind.

Well put, liberalmeltdown Joseph Sobran and for most of us, easily understood digestible spoon-fed purée.
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There, Fixed it for you.
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As for the rest of your drivel, “Dr” Earl, I will let you continue to live in your fantasy land – a dream land where all liberals are idiots and you are a “doctor” who “voted” for Obama.

liberalmeltdown,
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I will give Sobran’s essay an A+, provided:
1. The title of the essay was “Why imagining is better than fantasising”
2. Sobran was a 5th grade student.
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We know the above isn’t true, but Sobran does use 3rd grade tactics i.e. When told to write an essay, they fill up the pages upon pages of unrelated garbage.
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Anyway, my critique :
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A. The author simply asserts that Liberalism is a watered-down piecemeal version of socialism :
Where is the body of real world evidence to support this assertion?? How can you accept that statement at face value? Cant you think for yourself? I wont go into the nuances and the differences between Socialism and Liberalism, because your brain will, anyway, probably go into panic mode and shut down to protect its world view.
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B. The main assertion, Liberalism == fantasy:
This time, there is a half-hearted attempt at supporting this assertion:
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The liberal proposes his dream of, say, national health care; and then he reviles as “inhumane” and “lacking compassion” those who assume the burden of imagining the real consequences.When, amid the ruins, one side says to the other, “I told you so,” that’s imagination rebuking fantasy.

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Wait… What?
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So, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Canada are not real countries, they exist in a liberal version of fantasy land?
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Or, Maybe these countries do exists, but their national health care system are in “ruins” and you can go around screaming at them – “I told you so” ?
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A miserable FAIL on all counts.
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But, you dont have to worry about that, liberalmeltdown – because that essay isn’t yours in the first place !! You are just a mindless drone who repeats it.

Yep, that’s my job description: mindless drone.

Come on Maverick, you keep talk talk talking about all this original thought and critical thinking, and all I see is silly criticism.

Your move.

boohoo.. Now, aren’t you going to accuse me of being an elitist ? LOL