Sound and Fury Signifying Demogoguery

Before I get started, I just have to mention one of the STUPIDEST comments in the history of mankind and it comes from that grand lady of Progressive Liberalism. Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Unemployment benefits are creating jobs faster than practically any other program, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.
Talking to reporters, the House speaker was defending a jobless benefits extension against those who say it gives recipients little incentive to work. By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job.
“It injects demand into the economy,” Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”
Pelosi said the aid has the “double benefit” of helping those who lost their jobs and acting as a “job creator” on the side.
“It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country that would say we’re not going to have unemployment benefits,” Pelosi said.
So the best way to create jobs is to have more unemployed!!
Orwell would be applauding. No better Doublespeak has even been uttered.
And by that standard President Obama is one of the most successful Presidents since The Great Depression!!
*****************************
Vice President Biden is out  with an alarmed e-mail cash appeal warning that the GOP will mount a  blitzkrieg against Democrats in the fall.
Comparing GOP tactics to the fast-striking forces of  Nazi Germany,  Biden warns in a message sent by the DCCC today: As things heat up, you  can expect House Democrats will be hit with a GOP blitzkrieg of vicious  Swift-Boat-style attack ads, Karl Rove-inspired knockout tactics,  thinly veiled attempts at character assassination and tea party  disruptions. And while the GOP is mounting a blitzkrieg, Democrats  are the allies.
Our Democratic allies in the House need your help,  and the President  and I hope we can count on you to come to their defense so we can hold  onto our Democratic Majority and continue moving American forward in a  new direction, Biden writes in the appeal.
Subtle? Not so much.
************************************
“There are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders,” he said. “Our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work.”
While Arizona lawmakers defend their law as necessary to patrol the border, Obama described it as “unenforceable” and a vehicle for civil rights abuse.
“So, despite the forces of the status quo, despite the polarization and the frequent pettiness of our politics, we are confronting the great challenges of our times.  And while this work isn’t easy, and the changes we seek won’t always happen overnight, what we’ve made clear is that this administration will not just kick the can down the road.”
<>
“But it is also ill conceived.  And it’s not just that the law Arizona passed is divisive -– although it has fanned the flames of an already contentious debate.  Laws like Arizona’s put huge pressures on local law enforcement to enforce rules that ultimately are unenforceable. “

So the rule of law is unenforceable??
The locals can’t possible enforce it, so leave it up to Big Brother to ignore it for you. Be Happy.
Don’t you just feel better now?
Gee, that’s “Hope” and “Change” for ya….
“These laws also have the potential of violating the rights of innocent American citizens and legal residents, making them subject to possible stops or questioning because of what they look like or how they sound. And as other states and localities go their own ways, we face the prospect that different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country -– a patchwork of local immigration rules where we all know one clear national standard is needed.”
Still hasn’t read it has he!
Beat that Race Card over their heads!
STRIKE FEAR IN THEIR HEARTS!!!!
“That’s why businesses must be held accountable if they break the law by deliberately hiring and exploiting undocumented workers.  We’ve already begun to step up enforcement against the worst workplace offenders.”
Has anyone told Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who was airing a PSA asking Illegals to call her if they are being exploited by businesses so they can go after the business??
“And, yes, this is an emotional question, and one that lends itself to demagoguery.  Time and again, this issue has been used to divide and inflame -– and to demonize people.”
And he’s the Alinsky Master Sith Lord of it!
So the bottom line is this:  The southern border is more secure today than at any time in the past 20 years.
<<>
“I’m ready to move forward, the majority of Democrats are ready to move forward, and I believe the majority of Americans are ready to move forward,” Obama said.
They are, with Border Enforcement FIRST!
But that’s not on THE AGENDA.

The president blamed Republicans for exacerbating the problem. He suggested places like Arizona are unilaterally taking up the issue because GOP senators backed away from immigration reform following the debate several years ago led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Obama blamed political posturing and “demagoguery” for Washington’s inability to deal with the problem, pressing Republicans to step up.
“The fact is without bipartisan support, as we had just a few years ago, we cannot solve this problem,” Obama said at American University in Washington, D.C. (You mean Amnesty?)

Sounds like demagoguery to me.
He knows he has no chance of passing it in an election year like this. So he’s just pandering to his base, and to the Hispanics.
He wants them to turn out this fall to vote against the “racists”.
He knows it.
He doesn’t care.
It’s all a political calculation. Nothing more.
All sound and Fury, signifying nothing other than pure political theatre of the crass.
*****
Mexico gets its a say in one of the lawsuits challenging Arizona’s immigration enforcement law.
A federal judge on Thursday granted Mexico’s request to be allowed to file a legal brief supporting the challenge. That means the judge will consider the brief Mexico submitted previously.
Mexico says it wants to defend its citizens’ rights and that the law would lead to racial profiling and hinder trade and tourism. It also says the law would hinder work against drug trafficking and related violence.
A Foreign country gets a say…But we’re the racists?
America, what a country!
Amnesty International recently issued a report claiming illegal immigrants in Mexico — typically from Central America — face abuse, rape and kidnappings, and that Mexican police do little to stop it. When illegal immigration was a criminal offense in Mexico, officials were known to seek bribes from suspects to keep them out of jail.
But Mexico said it has a legitimate interest in defending its citizens’ rights and that Arizona’s law would lead to racial profiling, hinder trade and tourism, and strain the countries’ work on combating drug trafficking and related violence.
IBD editorial:
The president’s immigration address was little more than a cynical bid to sugarcoat amnesty for illegals as his polls sag. Maybe that’s because he’s not doing his real job: fostering jobs and enforcing the border.
In a speech Thursday that oozed Emma Lazarus-like treacle, the president distilled the current crisis facing states — from Arizona’s massive kidnapping rate and loss of control of territory, to California’s bankrupt state hospitals and schools, to Texas’ near-catastrophic destruction of a dam and cartel violence spillover — as merely an issue of Americans disliking immigrants, as if there were no difference between legal and illegal.
“These (immigrants) and men and women like them across this country, remind us that immigrants have always helped to build and defend this country — and that being an American is not a matter of blood or birth,” President Obama said, apparently forgetting that the people he was describing were legal immigrants.
His inability to admit this is a sign that he’s adopted the narrative of the politically muscular open-borders lobby. As his popularity fades and November’s midterm election approaches, he’s now pandering for Latino votes.
It’s clear enough by his past statements: He declared last April 30 that amnesty had zero chance of passing in Congress and wasn’t worth the political effort. “I don’t want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn’t solve the problem,” he said then.
But as his popularity fell, he told Arizona Sen. John Kyl on June 18, in words heard by others, that Arizona’s border security would be held a political hostage to amnesty.
“The problem is … if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’” Kyl explained at a meeting held in an Arizona border town.
And even in Thursday’s speech, the president admitted that his proposals for immigration reform “cannot pass without Republican votes,” which he knows he won’t get.
So Obama’s sudden interest in what’s euphemistically called “comprehensive immigration reform” can only be one thing: a bid to shore up poll numbers as elections near. A Rasmussen poll showed 32% of voters strongly approving of Obama when he vowed not to pursue immigration reform. Today it’s about 26%.
With trouble like that, it’s not surprising to see him looking to energize special interest groups, even with a bill he knows can’t pass.
The problem is, placing electoral politics above governing amounts to a diversion from his own responsibilities as president.
In characterizing Americans who only want existing laws enforced as racists, attention gets diverted from the fact that the president isn’t doing his job of protecting our borders.
In his speech, the president set up his straw men and knocked them down.
He then set out his own idea — amnesty, with a few wrist-slaps for those who break the law — as a reasonable compromise between a pure amnesty and a systematic roundup of 12 million illegals.
It’s a false choice, because there are no advocates of full amnesty outside the extreme academic left, and nobody seeks mass deportation. The real issue is that existing federal laws, passed and on the books, are being ignored. That’s why Arizona made a law to ensure that the state enforces them. And other states are following.
The president denounced Arizona’s new immigration law, falsely claiming as the amnesty lobby does that Arizona police could stop anyone on the basis of skin color alone. Not true.
It all points to a political agenda whose main aim is to win votes for the president’s party. It reeks of politics — and that politics, awfully enough, comes at the expense of the most basic governing leadership required of a president.
*****
So sleep soundly America, knowing that the government says securing the border is impossible and if you try to do it yourself you’re a racist and it’s unenforceable.
So let the government ignore it for you.
We are from the government and we are here to protect you.

You Can Lie with Spin

Government these days isn’t about making the hard choices. It’s about making the choice that will sell, either to “your base” (thus ignoring everyone else) or by spin (which is inevitably deceitful) because it will benefit you or one of your “sides” interests.

They write 2000+ bills they won’t read. But expect everyone to follow.
They can’t be bothered to read SB1070, at a minimalist 16 pages.
Much easier to just play on people fears, anxiety,biases, and divide and conquer.
And when that doesn’t work, just lie.
Then there’s the politician favorite phrase these days, “I misspoke”.
No, we have it on tape or audio.
But they “misspoke”.
Then you get stuff like this:
President Barack Obama, fresh from a win on a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations, on Saturday urged Congress to take up his proposal for a $90 billion, 10-year tax on banks as the next step in reform.
Obama wants to slap a 0.15 percent tax on the liabilities of the biggest U.S. financial institutions to recoup the costs to taxpayers of the financial bailout.
“We need to impose a fee on the banks that were the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer assistance at the height of our financial crisis — so we can recover every dime of taxpayer money,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
He does realize that a tax on business is passed onto the consumer right?
He doesn’t care. It sounds good.
It plays to his anti-capitalist base and the “wall street” anger that has been ginned up.
The fact that Congress in the 1990′s set up the roots of this problem and the Government agency in charge of monitoring them were too busy with Porn is not a matter for discussion.
And one of the biggest players in this whole mess, Fannie and Freddie were and are  ignored should be a sign.
Alinsky, Rules for Radicals:
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Daniel Foster at the conservative National Review Online argues that the bill is filled with unnecessary or useless measures.
“There is much in the bill that has nothing to do with ‘Wall Street’ or the root causes of the crisis (i.e. debit card and interchange fee rules),” Foster writes. “There is little in it that will ‘reform’ too big to fail or change the incentives for the kind of behavior that led to the crisis (implicit subsidies and bailout authority galore); and it was a ‘compromise’ mostly between Democrats.”

Then you have VP Joe Biden, a one man gaffe machine:
VP Biden ran into an ice cream shot owner (in his shop) who aked him to lower the taxes and he called the guy a “smartass”
And it gets better:
Vice President Joe Biden gave a stark assessment of the economy Friday, telling an audience of supporters, “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”
Appearing at a fundraiser with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) in Milwaukee, the vice president remarked that by the time he and President Obama took office in 2008, the gross domestic product had shrunk and hundreds of thousands of jobs had been lost.
“We inherited a godawful mess,” he said, adding there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.” (CBS)
Andrew Langer, The Daily Caller:

Ultimately, with election victory comes the responsibility of governance. That responsibility requires grappling with the excruciating problem of making tough choices. This is something all elected officials face at some time or another, and it is the caveat for anyone interested in pursuing a political career. Problems ensue when political leaders abdicate their responsibilities—and a case can be made that such abdication is an abuse of the public trust. And when it comes to domestic policy, there is no more important issue than the creation of a government’s annual budget.
For the past three years, there has been a disturbing trend of federal legislators essentially punting their responsibilities—whether it comes to oversight of federal agencies, understanding the constitutional implications of legislation, or, at its most basic, actually reading legislation being voted upon. This seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of the role of legislators in our republic has resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of public ire, from Tea Parties to very public “dressing downs” of congressmen at Town Hall meetings.
Congress should have gotten the message, yet as proof they are deaf to their constituencies, leaders in the House have recently done—or not done—something stunning. Congressional leaders have decided that they are unable to even propose, let alone pass, a federal budget this year.
They have ostensibly done this while they await the decision of President Obama’s “Deficit Commission,” a convenient fiction created to give cowardly Democrats the “cover” necessary for a tax increase following the 2010 elections. It is not their fault, they will argue when they eventually do propose a budget. They were forced to do this because of the recommendations of the commission.
It is an excuse that doesn’t hold water. Congress has the responsibility for the budget, which means that the majority party has the responsibility for getting it prepared and shepherded through the system and passed. It is, in fact, statutorily mandated. But without any consequences, the law has about as much real power as a Las Vegas illusionist: it’s great theatre, but it really doesn’t do what it claims.
The problem is that more and more government entities (including state and local governments) are shifting these powers to unelected commissions. While some might call it mere “punting”—moving the power to some other group of individuals—it’s more accurately a form of political surrender; the functional equivalent of throwing in the towel because, well, the job is just too darn hard, and, in an election cycle, these guys want the title but they don’t want the responsibilities to go along with it.
Spending and size of government are the two top issues going into this fall election, with healthcare reform playing a role in both. Voters not only are fed up with out-of-control spending, they’re genuinely fearful of the potential economic instability runaway spending creates. Controlling that spending is infinitely more complicated when government officials refuse to release a budget detailing just how that money is being spent. It was, interestingly enough, the continued secrecy of national budgets that brought Gorbachev to power as the Soviet Union’s last premier—and opening up those budgets to greater scrutiny one of the hallmarks of his Perestroika program. How ironic, then, that more than two decades later, America is moving in that direction—an entirely wrong direction—when it comes to budgets.
Americans are tired of cowardly politicians. They are tired of being lied to, of having polls say one thing and do quite the opposite. They are hungry for real leaders—leaders who mean what they say and say what they mean. Leaders who are willing to make the tough choices, like Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey.
Whether it’s trying to shift responsibility or surrendering to the difficulties of governance, either way the result is the same: Americans’ government grows larger without anyone exercising fiscal restraint. Political leaders raise taxes to try and pay for their inability to control spending. Overall we all suffer. Unfortunately, in this case, waiting until January 2011 might just be too late.

•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
• The deficit will reach a stunning $1.5 trillion this year. Even after the recession ends, trillion-dollar deficits will persist, causing the national debt to double by 2020.
• Excessive spending—not low revenues—accounts for 92% of deficits by 2014 and 100% by 2017.
• Solutions that “split the difference” between tax hikes and spending cuts doesn’t really address the source of the problem: spending.
• Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest costs will surge by nearly $2 trillion by 2020. By comparison, the cost of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is 85% less at $404 billion.

Tax Increases Are Not the Solution

• Raising federal income taxes to pay for entitlement spending would require rates to double by 2050 and continue to rise thereafter.
• Balancing the budget with tax increases alone would increase the tax burden from an average of 18% of the economy to 30% by 2055.
• Layering on a value added tax (VAT)—a new national sales tax—would create a huge drag on the economy and family budgets.
• A VAT would cause the price of everything to rise by 15–20%. By 2019, 44 cents of every dollar would go to the federal government, compared to 15 cents today.

Tax Hikes Have Harmful Economic Consequences

• Tax increases take money from families and businesses, lowering savings and investment and killing jobs. This is especially harmful in the current economic climate.
• Future generations—who can’t yet vote—will be stuck paying the higher taxes and inheriting lower standards of living that go with it.
• Any new federal income taxes would be on top of state and local taxes, such as income, property, excise, fuel, and sales taxes.
• A VAT would become a cash cow for Congress to fund new spending and open the door for continued, stealthy rate increases.
• Twenty of 29 developed economies with a VAT have increased rates since passage. Denmark leads, having increased their VAT from 15 to 25% since it was enacted.

Congress has been mismanaging taxpayer dollars for decades. Can Washington really be trusted to use new revenues to close the deficit gap, or would they just spend the money on new programs? (heritage.org)

I would say no.
When you can just “misspeak” or “The previous administration…” or “the party of no” or just demonize someone else, why bother.
It is much easier to spend than to be responsible.
After all, it’s not the politician’s money.
It’s yours.
And you’ll always be there for them so why should they worry.