Local view: Conservative bullies seek more money, power at our expense
January 2, 2013 at 6:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
Bullies enjoy power and often feel entitled to more than their share. This generates conflict, something that could be seen clearly during the struggle over the fiscal cliff in Washington, D.C.
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Nonsense, of course. You could substitute liberal words and phrases for every conservative one and this dribble would make just as much sense. It goes both ways, believe it (and like it) or not.
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absolutely agree and if anything democrats are trying to extort more than their fair share out of republicans in the form of expecting more while giving up less ….that being said if i had that type of money i wouldnt be spending it on political campaigns and ironically named think tanks thats for darn sure.
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Yep…
The problem is that the left is too far left and the right is too far right. Humans are not left or right, white or black, tall or short… We are varying degrees of each factor.
The grey area is not being represented in politics. I say we stand up and fight for the Grey area!
Viva la Medio!
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Not so much Dan. Or, better yet, prove it. One of the weaknesses of the conservative movement is the lack of factual debate. You folks a great at the one-liners but why not come up with a few real examples. Please provide your counterpoints that are equal in influence to ALEC, Tea Brothers, and Norquist. Recent history shows that there has been an downward spike in our political discourse and cooperation, and that can pretty much be drawn to the groups the author so eloquently described.
And you might as well throw in the Citizens United decision by the Big Court as providing one of the mechanisms for these groups to flourish.
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“Liberal mega-donors embrace super PACs”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82965.html
That took all of ten seconds. Are you seriously suggesting only conservatives throw big money at politicians?
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In 10 seconds, you probably failed to notice that nobody in that article has anything close to same influence as the people he listed.
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Ranger: George Soros, moveon.org and AFSCME/Teamsters/AFL-CIO/SEIU/UAW/most every other labor group.
I’m glad the writer is a former professor. We don’t need this kind of liberal blather infecting the minds of today’s youth.
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as an economist myself i can tell you that you are dead wrong when it comes to liberal professors at least in that area of study and at my school (UMD)…if anything there is a strong conservative curriculum but it may very well be taught by a liberal minded professor…but WHAT they are actually studying is quite conservative…id say 80 percent free market ideology and 20 percent Keynesian ideology maybe 70 -30 ratio..but i digress. If you wanted a radical liberal viewpoint (aka Marxism) you had to seek it out yourself in registration, it wasnt requisite.
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It is one thing to provide money, and a much different thing to give money AND provide ‘model’ legislation that often is entered into legislative debate to become law. This is what ALEC is set up to do, and the actual proof is in the legislative record in our statehouses and federal government. It is one thing to provide money, and yet another thing to drive disinformation campaigns as the likes of the Heritage Foundation has done over the years. It is one thing to donate money and yet another thing to drive an actual fanatical new segment of a political party as the Koch Bros have done with the Tea Party. There are examples of donations, large money on both sides of course, but it does seem that the the conservatives hold a special place for their investments to be created to drive their own narrow special interests. And Grover Norquist and his bunch are the very best example- “do this, or I bring the wrath of god upon you at your next reelection” he got what he paid for for a long time.
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Ranger~ You are correct about the legislation pushed at state levels but the 112th Congress because of Repubs obstructionism just set a record for the LEAST amount of bills passed. Just sayin’….
Heritage Foundation~ Bush quoted their research and analysis of going to war in Iraq which claimed it would be over in 1 1/2 years and would pay for itself. Bush also quoted the Heritage Foundation findings to push his wealthy tax cuts that said it would create a record number of jobs and a 5 to 6 Trillion budget surplus. I bring this up because too many forgotten those little gems that influenced our public policy…which from serving as advisor to Reagan forward to setting up the Heritage Foundation…was Coors sole intent. Coors intents was to disband corporate taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and all government assistance programs and all government regulations. Gee— see any of those in the Repubs talking points and agenda’s? LMAO…
“I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends… that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. ”
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
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Liberal crap. Was forced to go to Peace Church for a baptism and had to listen to an hour-long powerpoint on liberal propaganda and catholic bashing. It was uncomfortable to say the least if you weren’t wholly in agreement. If this were a conservative church liberals would be crying to have their non-profit status revoked. Seperation of church and state. Lets keep it that way (on both sides).
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Apparently Ranger believes that citizens cannot discuss and develop legislation with fellow like-minded Americans.
For the lunatic liberal, the bogeyman is EVERYWHERE. Fox News. The Heritage Foundation. ALEC. The Koch Brothers. Rush Limbaugh.
Sadly, the narrative from the left continues to be a continuous droning of cute lil’ anecdotes, tin foil hat-type conspiracy theory and an overwhelmingly irresponsible deferral to the lowest common denominator.
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Edited for accuracy…..
For the lunatic conservatives, the bogeyman is EVERYWHERE. created by Fox News. The Heritage Foundation. ALEC. The Koch Brothers. Rush Limbaugh.
Sadly, the narrative from the them continues to be a continuous droning of cute lil’ anecdotes and lies like 47% of population is lazy and living off of government assistance and not paying taxes, that tax cuts to wealthy creates jobs, that Democrats are the big spenders, that the 1.2 trillion deficit they created is Obama’s doing, that dead people are coming back to life to vote, that voter fraud is rampant, that Acorn is responsible for thousands of fraudulent votes, that Obama is Muslim, that Obama wasn’t born here, that Social Security is going broke, that government regulations is preventing the economy from growing, along with a host of other tin foil hat-type conspiracy theories like Obama is a Marxist trying to destroy our country and turn us into a communist state and an overwhelmingly irresponsible deferral to the lowest common denominator.
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“that government regulations is preventing the economy from growing” – fastone. So fastone, besides Bush (cuz I know he’s the root of all of your ills) just what is preventing the economy from growing? You have a socialist president and the “hypocrats” control the Senate (and House for Obumma’s first two years) so you should have your utopia. You need to stop getting your news from that nice gentleman Rachel Maddow and open your eyes.
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“The Bush administration removed regulations for banking and wall street”
Not true. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, which forbade financial companies from offering both commercial and investment banking services was signed by Bill Clinton in 1999. (not saying it was a bad idea, but Bush had nothing to do with it.)
The Bush Administration broke every previous record for regulatory agency spending. Adjusting for inflation, the regulatory budget grew from $25 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $43 billion in FY 2009 — a 70 percent increase. “In constant dollars,” wrote James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal, “the Bush regulatory budget increases vastly exceeded those of predecessors Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and, yes, Lyndon Johnson.” Staffing skyrocketed, too. Regulatory agencies employed 175,000 people in 2000. They employed 264,000 in 2009.
On July 31, 2002, declaring that free markets must not be “a financial free-for-all guided only by greed,” Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a sweeping overhaul of corporate fraud, securities, and accounting laws. Among its many tough provisions, the law created a new regulatory agency to oversee public accounting firms and auditors, and imposed an array of new requirements for financial reporting and corporate audits.
Clinton’s secretary of housing was Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo, as Wayne Barrett wrote in the Village Voice in 2008, made a series of decisions that “helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded ‘kickbacks’ to brokers that fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans.
Saying that Bush was responsible for deregulation has been repeated so many times by people who want to blame him for everything that many just accept it as a fact. Sounds a lot like this Faux News Parrot thing you keep referring to.
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Understand that the left is not interested in the truth, only what will further the nanny state social agenda.
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Of course, if it didn’t it wouldn’t be true.
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Unlike the folks from the Right who rely on the finest “facts” carefully misquoted from other media sources. I have to admit that the ones who are really good at it provide some fun. For example, Rush often sounds very credible until you poke around. But *my* personal favorite is George Will. I swear he must employ several stats geeks just looking for stuff he can present out of context.
In any case, keep those insightful comments coming “Smart”imus.
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Lets be careful here. First, the report Jacoby was citing does indeed note a huge increase of regulation budgets from 2000 to 2008. And almost the entire increase is in the area of Homeland Security if you look at the reports. Wonder what might have happened between 2000 and 2008 to cause a $20B increase in regulations associated with Homeland Security (weird, my clock reads 9:11, wonder why that sticks out?). Note also that the Heritage foundation’s notion of inflation adjusted dollars uses SS numbers which do not jibe with the actual change in the GDP. To measure government expenditures it is safer to look at the spending in terms of percentage of GDP (which makes the regulation outside of Homeland Security roughly the same at the beginning and a the end).
As to the repeal of Glass-Steagal coming under Clinton, its true that Clinton signed the final bill, but it was popular in Congress by that point because various workarounds had been popularized in the early 80s, then OKed in 1987 (under Reagan) and further refined in 1990 (under HW Bush). By the late 90s the damage had been done and some organizations were viewed to be operating at a disadvantage with respect to others (Merrill Lynch, etc.), and the decision was made to eliminate the distinction with the intention to more fully regulate down the line. So, the fact that Clinton signed the last bill is misleading, the damage was done under Reagan.
Sarbanes-Oxley is red herring as it focused on a different aspect of markets. More meaningful is the failure of Congress during both the Bush W and Obama administrations to fully fund the new regulations imposed after the 2007 crash.
The funny thing about regulation is that almost no one in the US seems to realize that regulation in the US is actually quite limited compared to almost every other country around the world. For example, only Singapore beats out the US in an analysis of 122 nations in terms of least labor regulation (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lab_reg-labor-regulation). In terms of ease of doing business the US ranks 4th among 185 nations ranked (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index). Yes, I know that the Conservative Entertainment Complex led by Faux News argues the opposite, but they don’t actually use meaningful numbers of facts to support their statements (they almost always find one or two business people to say that they are overregulated, and voila, you have a Faux News report). You just have to start with “People are talking about …” and its even true (in the sense that they are talking about it, so anything they say after that is true regardless of the accuracy of their claims).
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Rick~ Excellent post, was going to point out that increased regulatory spending does not mean increased bank or business regulations and all the increases were for national security.
So just wanted to add that In 2000 it was outgoing Republican Sen. Phil Gramm from Texas that attached a rider to an appropriations bill to deregulate derivatives trading and other complicated financial instruments like collateral debt obligations. It is correct this was the nail in coffin for Glass-Seagall act and Clinton signed it, something he’s on record as regretting and saying had unsound advise on signing it, but was Republican that wrote in and slipped in a bill and a Republican controlled Congress that was pushing it. The same Faux News twist that because Obama signed the bailouts then is his fault…the removal of Glas-Steagall was a Republican agenda led by Graham and NOT a Clintion initiative or cause at all. He shouldn’t have signed it…but it was Repubs, not Clintons agenda to dismantle Glas-Steagall and open up derivatives markets by remoning regulations and oversight.
A
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Yes, but Clinton played some part. And the Obama folks have not been particularly forceful on regulation either.
You know how those ultra liberal socialists are, always helping out big business.
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My original post was a response to your post that said, “The Bush administration removed regulations for banking and wall street”
(A post that you have since removed and edited, I might add)
You were calling others Faux news parrots while at the same time spouting facts that were completely untrue.
Clinton made the right choice by repealing Glass-Steagal, outlawing full service banking was putting American Banks at a disadvantage. This measure was overwhelmingly popular on both sides of Congress, Democrat and Republican.
Five years earlier, Clinton supported the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which finally legalized interstate branch banking. Federal and state laws that forbade intrastate and interstate branch banking – that is, diversification – were one of the worst features of American finance. They made banks highly vulnerable to failure of specific business centers and farm communities, helping to make the Great Depression what it was. (By contrast, Canada had no such restrictions and no bank failures.)
So Clinton – not Bush – was the bank deregulator. Were those acts responsible for the financial debacle of 2008? No. Bear Stearns, Lehman, etc. were not affiliated with commercial banks.
Banks got in trouble because they filled their portfolios with securities built on shaky mortgages.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/bill-clintons-deregulation-myth/#ipEKzYbYvGpXgOd1.99
That is where Clinton bears responsibility, see my earlier post on Andrew Cuomo, his secretary of housing, regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or see above referenced article.
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Oops, this was a reply to Fastones post.
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Ted~ There is no dispute that Clinton bears responsibility for the Fannie and Freddie Mac easing of mortagage regulations so think we’re on same page there? It’s the speculation on those loans though that created the economic mess. Often mistated as cause is the shakey loans to begin with but there weren’t enough bad loans with people with bad credit to topple our whole economy.
The difference of opinion is regarding the regulations over derivatives which impacted the banking and mortgage businesses with investment banking and hedge fund managers scooping up and overselling their worth, on that portion I assume we agree. Without that the shakey Fannie and Freddie loans wouldn’t had the meltdown they did. So the dispute comes down to Clintons responsibility. Yes, he signed the bill so you are correct in saying that he own’s responsibility for it and you would be correct. But you are IMHO also wrong…as it was never Clinton’s agenda, it was never his cause and wasn’t his legislation he pushed, or advocated or even understood, it was he was pushed in way to it…still he’s responsible for signing it ….but it was Republicans and Republican controlled Congress that pushed this and was their agenda to remove the regulations, not Clinton’s. We can agree to disagree on this and is fine with me BTW because you can state Clinton responsible for signing and would be correct and assume you know I’m correct that it was Republican agenda and Phil Graham slipping it in as rider on another bill to get it passed.
Thank you for a well thought out response and not just a bunch of spouted baseless garbage btw, something don’t see very often here from conservatives and it was those type of responses by others was referring to when saying Faux News parrots.
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Fastone, this site is whacked. My reply ended up way on the top somewhere and I had to type it twice.
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I’ll try again.
fastone – Yes, we do agree on many points. But I do want to repeat and make very clear that I don’t think the repeal of Glass-Steagall caused the financial meltdown. The big banks that failed could have done everything that they did long before the repeal. So blaming Clinton or Repubs is really immaterial.
Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs, another favorite villain of the left.
The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there.
Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender. (Steven Pearlstein,July 28, 2012, Washington Post)
But for the sake of a good debate, to answer your statement that “but it was Republicans and Republican controlled Congress that pushed this and was their agenda to remove the regulations, not Clinton’s.”
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act was passed in November 1999. Yes, it was introduced by three Republicans. But look at the final vote in the Senate and House!
Passed the Senate 90-8. (58 Rep, 32 Dem)
Passed the House 362-57 (207 Rep, 155 Dem)
Then signed into law by a DFL President.
You couldn’t get that Bipartisan today if you introduced Legislation declaring that the sky is blue.
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Ted- We’re chasing down a rabbit hole, which am OK with but the initial point was who was responsible for deregulation of derivatives that aided in the crash and who was responsible for deregulation of banking industry that led to crash. That said, it wasn’t just investment firms involved in derivatives, it was all banks that packaged their mortgages and sold as derivatives. Which one of biggest doing that was Wachovia who was selling those packaged deals all over the world as investments which is why they crashed. Not as you suggested that just because made some bad or risky mortgage loans. It was because they packaged those risky loans with other loans as a package which then had a AAA rating so when the individual loans went default it make all those packaged with them worthless. Wachovia in particular was not because of bad mortgages. They were primarily a commercial investment bank, yes they sold mortgages too, but the bulk of business was commercial, investment and securities. So it wasn’t a few bad mortgages took down the 4th largest bank in country at that time, it was the packaged derivatives they sold as investments that did.
Thanks for proving was majority Republican legislation and that was Republican controlled Congress and majority of votes for the Graham-Leach-Billy act were Republicans. But you’re looking at wrong thing, you need to look at the Commodities Futures Moderization Act of 2000. That also was Republican legislation and THAT is what opened up the derivatives market to banks. Yes, Clinton signed it..as lame duck on Dec. 21, 2000 but the point here is who set this up which helped collapse the finacial institutions and it wasn’t Clinton and it wasn’t some bad mortgages, it was legislation by Repubs for less regulation and oversight and free for all market in dirivative markets. It also was of course the greed of the banks and brokerage firms and hedge fund managers that oversold everything.
What everyone overlooks in this is that we were in a recession and Bush wanted a war and knew full well couldn’t get it if in recession mode. So had Fed lower rates and everyone went nuts and bought new houses and cars fueling what appeared to be a recovered economy but it was a house of cards because never fixed what was wrong with economy. We just spurred it short term by everyone increasing their debt and going on frantic spending sprees. Most didn’t use the new rates to refinance and pay down house, they used it to get bigger house. Another house of cards was this set up a real estate market where house pricing on supply and demand shot up and became over inflated, the banks were raking it in with all the activity….BUT…we never fixed the problems with economy…and obviously it all imploded.
There were many factors involved and already posted that Clinton admits that shouldn’t have signed the Commodities Futures Act…but who really pushed that legislation, who controlled the Congress to get it passed and who oversaw the economy for 7 years before the whole economy collapsed? It’s not a convenient truth for conservatives understandably, but understanding it then helps in ensuring we don’t go down that path again and clearly, removal of oversight and regulations was the problem and it’s not Dems but Repubs that wanted regulations removed and less banking regulations in fact been an agenda for them for decades.
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@Ted Foley
I love it! Supporting your argument with a link from World News Daily. They make Faux News look like journalists — like quoting the National Enquirer (well, that’s kind of unfair … To the Enquirer).
There are many good books on the causes of the Great Recession. Pick up Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail and Lewis’ The Big Short. Lots of folks deserve blame including the American public, but putting Clinton at the center takes tabloid journalism (which is the point of WND).
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@Rick M
I agree with you that lots of people deserve blame, and I wasn’t necessarily putting Clinton at the center of it all. I was simply showing that he was as responsible as anyone for the housing meltdown because of the changes made to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during his administration. Alan Greenspan deserves much of the blame as well for ignoring the potential catastrophe caused by derivatives. And does it matter which publication facts appear in as long as they are facts? If Fox News reported that it was Tuesday would it all be a fabrication and twisted logic? It’s all part of the public record. Can you dispute any of the facts on the reforms to Fanny and Freddy under Cuomo and Clinton?
It’s gotten really old listening to so many blame Bush for the economic collapse while creating their own facts. He’s an easy target and people use that to further their agenda. My original post was solely in response to Fastone saying that Bush deregulated banking and wall street when it was Clinton that did that. He also called people spreading misinformation, “Faux News Parrots.” (As soon as I pointed out his hypocrisy with actual facts the post was removed)
The President has very little control over the economy. They are just like Quarterbacks. They get way too much credit when things are good and way too much blame when they are bad.
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@Ted
Yes, this is a perfect example of why you don’t read the National Enquirer (i.e., World News Daily) for accurate news. The impression articles like the one you linked to leave is that Clinton’s folks were big players in the meltdown and responsible for deregulating the banks. A more accurate view would note that Clinton signed a law pushed by both sides to finish off deregulating the banks (with the intent that new regulation be passed) and that while the Clinton folks did allow Fannie and Freddie to get involved in subprime mortgages the Clinton folks did not anticipate what happened next. What happened? Fannie and Freddie (as quasi governmental organizations) pushed the new Bush administration hard to not look into their practices and the Bushies went right along. Unfortunately, as started being reported early in the 2000s, Fannie and Freddie not only began to aggressively push these mortgages but also used fraudulent accounting practices to cover what they were doing (following the rest of the industry). So, when you come right down to it, what you *do* prove by looking into the facts underlying the WND misstatements is that the Bushies do in fact bear a huge portion of the blame. And I’m sure that everyone who reads WND uses their stories as starting points to research the truth.
Again, I would suggest reading some books based on factual accounts, not the, ah, excrement, from the Conservative Entertainment Complex (Faux News, WND, etc.). WND is deliberately attempting to keep you ignorant. Deliberately. Think of it this way. The Soviet Union had a “news” service called Pravda (literally “The Truth”) that carefully selected its “facts” to give a viewpoint that supported their view of the world. The Conservative Entertainment Complex is our version of Pravda. Am I saying that Pravda (i.e., WND) was never right? No. But they are least likely to be right when criticizing the folks they are opposed to. As is easy to show in the link you included.
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@Rick
The article was not an editorial, it was written by John Stossel, former co-host of 20/20.
He’s received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award. The Dallas Morning News named him the “the most consistently thought- provoking TV reporter of our time” and the Orlando Sentinel said he “has the gift for entertaining while saying something profound.”
Earlier in his career, Stossel served as consumer editor for “Good Morning America” and as a reporter at WCBS-TV in New York City. His first job in journalism was as a researcher for KGW-TV (NBC) in Portland, Ore.
But since a certain publication chose to print his article, that makes him not credible? That’s ridiculous.
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@Ted
Stossel was fine when being held to a journalistic standard. Interesting about the 19 Emmys. I find one in the database where he is listed as the winner. I am guessing he got the other 18 as a member of popular shows (everyone on the staff gets named for the award).
Note that the awards stopped when he stopped trying to be a journalist and started being an advocate for a position (as he himself notes) when he joined Faux News. It happens. In any case, quoting Pravda is quoting Pravda.
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Whatever News Source you follow, is not much different than which politician you may follow. Im not able to rely on any news source or politician for factual and honest statements these days! It’s all a scam!
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Fox~ The Republican talking point since the New Deal has been that goverment regulations hold back companies. How about you prove and show how that is true.
What is and has been keeping our economy from growing is not complex, it’s very simple and has been that we don’t manufacture goods anymore to export, we import all our goods. Reagan’s push was that we would become a service based economy, which is a model for economic failure. We’ve not just shipped our manufacturing overseas but many service jobs as well so is double whammy. This has created not only a lack of jobs but a lack of good paying jobs and a lopsided supply and demand for workers requiring less specific skills which continually drives down earnable income as well as our enormous trade deficit. The person that was skilled worker making 35-40 grand with bennies is now a Wal-mart greeter scenario. All the while we’ve been rewarding companies, by lowering the taxes making them even more profitable, for taking our jobs away. It’s more complex then just this but that is the very heart of our problems. So the real kick is we’ve been rewarding companies with increased profits sold to us with the falsehood would create jobs for them to create jobs in China and India.
You were wrong naturally on everything…Obama isn’t a socialist, that’s a Faux News soundbite for those who don’t know what that means, Obama never had carte blanche his first two years, that’s another Republican lie and propaganda, and I don’t watch Rachel Maddow and she’s a she. I in fact haven’t watched TV for over a dozen years, everything on it including sitcoms even, but of course especially the news, are all trying to so transparently tell me what to think that it just aggravates me and have zero tolerance for it.
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world”… JRR Tolkien
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Please watch this, if you love your country. Our country is in trouble
http://vimeo.com/52009124
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Conservative will see the righting on the wall, progressive’s (liberal Democrats) are you the useful idiots ? Share this with everyone.
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Its amazing how many people who cannot accurately define the terms socialism (or even more humorously, communism) use the terms to promote fear.
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It’s always nice to see a good fiction piece
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what is not being discussed (and i truly do not know why) is the next order of business after the the fiscal cliff legislation that passed a net 605 bil in new revenue. mr obama has been very adamant that we must take a balanced approach to the debt crisis so it is incumbent upon him to propose 605 bil in reduced federal outlays (spread over 10 years). that should not be that difficult so i do not understand why this IS NOT in the current media discussion
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i would like to pass on info from the current article of msnbc online re the most recent update on social security. seems that there may be an 800 bil miscalculation in what may be available to pay out which would further shorten the solvency period to 2036. this would affect many current as well as the entire balance of the baby boom set to begin retirement in the next 15 years. this should surprise few as it is pretty obvious what is going on with the level as well as the quality of outputs vs inputs in the system. it may be that rather than chastise the fiscal conservative as a bully as this somewhat biased article headlines, we may all need their inputs to put us on a path to salvage the system for ALL. i do not see very many others stepping up with solutions.
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fastone – Yes, we do agree on many points. But I do want to repeat and make very clear that I don’t think the repeal of Glass-Steagall caused the financial meltdown. The big banks that failed could have done everything that they did long before the repeal. So blaming Clinton or Repubs is really immaterial.
Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs, another favorite villain of the left.
The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there.
Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender. (Steven Pearlstein,July 28, 2012, Washington Post)
But for the sake of a good debate, to answer your statement that “but it was Republicans and Republican controlled Congress that pushed this and was their agenda to remove the regulations, not Clinton’s.”
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act was passed in November 1999. Yes, it was introduced by three Republicans. But look at the final vote in the Senate and House!
Passed the Senate 90-8. (58 Rep, 32 Dem)
Passed the House 362-57 (207 Rep, 155 Dem)
Then signed into law by a DFL President.
You couldn’t get that Bipartisan today if you introduced Legislation declaring that the sky is blue.
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We have a democrat president and democrats control the Senate. How is it then that the republicans who control only the House are bullies? There has been no budget passed or even offered by the Obama administration since he was first inaugurated. There will be no budget passed certainly in the next two years. Obama projects $ trillion deficits for each of the next four years. That by itself tells me, there will be no cuts.
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Ted, yes we agree on many points. But I want to state again that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the financial collapse. So assigning blame for it is really immaterial. The big banks that failed could have done everything they did before the repeal. Glass-Steagall forbid banks from being involved in both Commercial and Investment banking.
Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs, another favorite villain of the left.
The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there.
Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender.
But for the sake of debate, to your point that it was a “Republican agenda and Phil Graham slipping it in as rider on another bill to get it passed.”
Gramm did not slip this in as a rider on another bill to get it passed. The Gramm, Leach, Bliley Act was it’s own bill. Yes, it was introduced by three Republicans, but look at the final vote!
It passed the Senate 90-8. (52 Rep, 38 Dem)
It passed the House 362-57 (207 Rep, 155 Dem)
Then signed by a Democrat President
You couldn’t get that Bi-Partisan today if you introduced legislation declaring that the sky was blue.
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Ted, you’re supposed to be replying to fastone here, fast, how many aliases do you have going that compliment each other? Lame
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Good Job you guys. Raising the bar of the DNT comment section is good for the community as a whole. Especially to those from the ‘outside’ who look at the local newspaper e-edition as a way to learn and understand a community. Yes We Can have civil debate in Duluth.
thanks
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Ted, Rick, and fastonec, lose the aliases, it’s annoying and redundant.
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