The Cost of Republican Policies for 8 yrs.

[cybertentbob]

Let's talk facts.We will know soon enough if the dreaded liberals who you dread (but not folks like cheney...lol) Wreck your dellusions of security....Just cause your not effected today by this mess your party created you might be soon.....But enough of my nonsense! lets list all the ways the Republican Party led by George Bush has subverted the constitution,wrecked public education,got us in a war by lying to us..the list goes on as well it should........

[Joker]

Do you honestly believe the Dems had nothing to do with the mess we're in now? :eek:

[cybertentbob]

nothing? sure some did. ..But repubs controlled the house and senate,the courts and white house..Do you HONESTLY think democrats could FUCK UP worse than the guy your party thought was presidential material?(snicker)????

[Shake Yer Bones]

.....Do you HONESTLY think democrats could FUCK UP worse than the guy your party thought was presidential material?(snicker)????


Well, the Democrats did manage to take the historically low approval ratings of Congress ... and make it worse.

[mule64]

here we go again. Bob, you can not honestly blame it all on Repubs, well maybe you can, you are dillusional. Dems had congress control the last two years and did nothing but put their own approval ratings to new lows. a lot of the current financial crisis is a direct result of the housing crisis caused mostly be Dems. Clinton pushed hard to relax standards of lending to get poor into houses they could not afford. Barney Franl lied about how stable freddie/fannie was, Dems took large amounts of cash out of freddie/fannie in bonuses for cooking the books. Bush and McCain tried to push for more regulation and people like that asshole Frank stopped it. You are absolutely wrong to blame all this on Bush and it amazes me that you have the balls to do so, wake up and smell the coffee.

[Joker]

nothing? sure some did. ..But repubs controlled the house and senate,the courts and white house..Do you HONESTLY think democrats could FUCK UP worse than the guy your party thought was presidential material?(snicker)????

Very doubtful, especially since I don't have a party and the party I did vote for wasn't led by a guy. (snicker) :wink:


I do know that the Dems and the Reps have BOTH been fucking it up pretty good for awhile now.

[cybertentbob]

here we go again. Bob, you can not honestly blame it all on Repubs, well maybe you can, you are dillusional. Dems had congress control the last two years and did nothing but put their own approval ratings to new lows. a lot of the current financial crisis is a direct result of the housing crisis caused mostly be Dems. Clinton pushed hard to relax standards of lending to get poor into houses they could not afford. Barney Franl lied about how stable freddie/fannie was, Dems took large amounts of cash out of freddie/fannie in bonuses for cooking the books. Bush and McCain tried to push for more regulation and people like that asshole Frank stopped it. You are absolutely wrong to blame all this on Bush and it amazes me that you have the balls to do so, wake up and smell the coffee.good morning! I am drinking my coffee!
and it smells good! why do you continue mule to defend the undefendable? you prefer incompetent government over liberal government? you prefer government that lies,subverts the constitution
and gives out corperate welfare? oh I forgot YOU DO!!!!!!:clapping:

[Phishfolk]

nothing? sure some did. ..But repubs controlled the house and senate,the courts and white house..Do you HONESTLY think democrats could FUCK UP worse than the guy your party thought was presidential material?(snicker)????

The Dems controlled congress for the last 2 years and didn't do a single thing to avert the mess we're in now.

[Joker]

The Dems controlled congress for the last 2 years and didn't do a single thing to avert the mess we're in now.Pelosi and Reid were going to save us all.

They promised us things would be different, that things would change.

They said they'd stop the war. It's not like they could have voted to stop funding it or anything :huh:


Ahhhh Smell that son? That's change.


Scrape it off your shoe before you come in the house

[cybertentbob]

The Dems controlled congress for the last 2 years and didn't do a single thing to avert the mess we're in now."controlled"? they have had little room or assistance by this heinous administration.:joker:

[Phishfolk]

"controlled"? they have had little room or assistance by this heinous administration.:joker:

I think that's the cop out excuse they have been feeding the public.

[DifferentDrummer]

let's just wait until this 8 year long disaster ends before we start judging the dems, mkay?

[Phishfolk]

My judgements are being made on past performance.

[cybertentbob]

Op-Ed Columnist
Eight Years of Madoffs




By FRANK RICH
Published: January 10, 2009

THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.


The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace.

After all, next to big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is what Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” would dismiss as “a mere bag of shells.” The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used ******* and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be put up by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents. But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grâce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

Just a short list is staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa” into the crucial prewar State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?

And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

The biggest question hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us? The president-elect himself struck this note last spring. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Barack Obama said. “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who has been our most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals, essentially agreed when I spoke to him last week. Though he remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: “I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.” He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. “We need to depoliticize it,” he says. “If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”

We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered “where is the outrage, the public outcry” over a government that has acted lawlessly and that “does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.” She asked, “How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that “we must avoid any temptation simply to move on,” because the national honor cannot be restored “without full disclosure.” She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture and “extraordinary rendition.” But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

As the financial historian Ron Chernow wrote in the Times last week, we could desperately use a Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator who illuminated the history of the 1929 meltdown in Senate hearings on the eve of the New Deal. The terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigations over whether he enriched himself and friends with government contracts.

The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.

[cybertentbob]

Editorial | Editorial Observer
Republicans’ Latest Talking Point: The New Deal Failed


By ADAM COHEN
Published: January 11, 2009

On Christmas Eve, the conservative pundit Monica Crowley argued on Fox News that instead of rescuing America from the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s spending on public works made it worse. She insisted that this bizarre claim was confirmed by “all kinds of studies and academic work.”


The show’s host backed her up. “Yes,” said Gregg Jarrett, “I think historians pretty much agree on that.” In the same vein, a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece said F.D.R. helped turn “a panic into the worst depression of modern times.” Now, as Congress begins to debate President-elect Barack Obama’s ambitious economic stimulus plan, this anti-New Deal talking point is popping up all over.

Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”

But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.

In the 1934 midterm elections, the voters delivered their first verdict on the New Deal, expanding the Democrats’ margins in Congress. In 1936, F.D.R. won in a bigger landslide than he had four years earlier. By 1940, the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was supporting much of Roosevelt’s social welfare and regulatory regime.

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life. When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for having presided over a “dime store New Deal.” But in recent years, the attacks have heated up.

At the start of the Bush administration, conservatives talked openly about rolling back the New Deal. They were trying to unravel the regulatory state, including protections for workers, consumers and investors. They were also promoting a favorite cause of Wall Street’s: privatizing Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal.

These days the public is in no mood, given the high costs of deregulation in the mortgage industry and the Bernard Madoff scandal, for more talk about dismantling regulations and federal oversight. But today, the new focus is Mr. Obama’s stimulus package. If F.D.R.’s New Deal spending made things worse, it follows that the Obama administration should not make the same mistake.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.

The second problem is that the criticism overlooks the relief Roosevelt’s programs brought to millions. When F.D.R. took office, unemployment was 25 percent, and families were losing their homes, living in shantytowns, even fighting one another for food at garbage dumps.

The difference that the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal public works programs made in people’s lives is incalculable.

F.D.R.’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, described in her memoir what a relief job meant to an “almost deaf, elderly lawyer” she knew whose practice had failed. He had gotten a job as a caretaker at a small seaside park. “He made little extra plantings,” she recalled, “arranged charming paths and walks, acted as guide to visitors, supervised children’s play.” When she saw him, she said, “he would always ask me to take a message to the President — a message of gratitude for a job which paid him fifteen dollars a week and kept him from starving to death.”

Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

[Joker]

Oh I get it now, when you said Let's talk facts.

you didn't really mean


Let's talk facts.

you meant let's talk opinions :wink:

[cybertentbob]

Oh I get it now, when you said

you didn't really mean




you meant let's talk opinions :wink:
one mans fact are anothers chocolate pudding!:clapping:

[Joker]

one mans fact are anothers chocolate pudding!:clapping: Perhaps but op-ed pieces and editorials are more opinion pieces rather than actual facts.

Now if you were to actually post facts to back up what you say you might be taken more serious than you are now.

One man's chocolate pudding is another's heaping pile of crap. In this case, I think what you're selling isn't chocolate pudding :wink:

[cybertentbob]

perhaps Joker you are right. But there is no defense of the last administrations conduct. The op -ed 's are opinions based on fact.
as for being taken seriously on this board....I won't lose any sleep over that!lol

[Joker]

I'm not trying to defend the administration. You started off saying let's talk facts and then you don't do that.

I ask you a fair question and you automatically accuse me of voting republican and snicker about it.

Sure some Republicans fucked up and so did some Democrats.

You're disgust for Bush and all things Republican seems to prevent you from seeing things with a clear head.

Will you call out Obama and the Dems if/when they screw up or will you make excuses, apologies for them and continue to put all things wrong squarely on the shoulders of the Reps.?

[cybertentbob]

I'm not trying to defend the administration. You started off saying let's talk facts and then you don't do that.

I ask you a fair question and you automatically accuse me of voting republican and snicker about it.

Sure some Republicans fucked up and so did some Democrats.

You're disgust for Bush and all things Republican seems to prevent you from seeing things with a clear head.

Will you call out Obama and the Dems if/when they screw up or will you make excuses, apologies for them and continue to put all things wrong squarely on the shoulders of the Reps.?Absolutly!
As for all things Bush...my hatred stems from the fact that an incapable person of bad character was placed in the whitehouse.
abused the trust of the nation,still to this day refuses to take responsibility for his crimes. My head is quite clear..theres nothing wrong with being partisan when you are right.
History will prove that this administration was the WORST in United States history and doesnt deserve the pass you all give it....:joker: