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Old 01-19-2009, 06:44 PM   #1
TheMercenary
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The Obamanation

This is a cool interactive map which shows the associations of Obama and people on capitol hill and in his new administration. Pretty neat.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a23bf7b4-e...0779fd2ac.html
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Old 01-19-2009, 06:54 PM   #2
classicman
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Neat chart on that site merc.
Here is the text for the lazy peeps... (like me)
Quote:
But it’s not just the faces that are changing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The Obama-led White House may be more crowded: So much time are staffers expected to be spending at the White House that Obama officials are already exploring ways in which their families can regularly visit them.

Grassroots campaign rhetoric aside, Mr Obama is likely to take a top down approach to implementing a more grueling schedule for his team. Mr Bush was usually in bed by 10pm and only rarely accepted invitations to dinner outside of the White House, but Mr Obama is a regular night bird. His staff will have to get used to a diet of evening meetings as well as the usual murderously early morning start. And Sunday may turn into a working day as well. Unlike Mr Bush, who had six weekly intelligence briefings a week, Mr Obama has been receiving seven.

More broadly, Washington’s power will switch from conservative to liberal and become younger. Many of the incoming 3,300 presidential appointees will be in their twenties or thirties and hail from Ivy League universities.

And unlike the Bush crowd’s southern tilt, many of Obama’s team will be from America’s derided ‘elite’ east or west coasts. The same may apply to the hundreds of students or young postgraduates filling the much coveted internships across the administration. Under Mr Bush, many interns were fervent Christians from Regent University and Liberty University in Virginia, in spite of those institutions’ relatively less than top-flight academic reputations.

But commentators sometimes also overstate the effects of a change of administration on DC culture. In practice, Washington has always been – and is likely to remain – a town of “Beltway insiders” who share a common addiction to politics and government.

Many of the incoming crowd, including Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, and Eric Holder were already living in Washington. And the outgoing Bush brigade isn’t likely to be leaving town in a hurry. America’s capital presents many tempting think tank sinecures and lobby group partnerships.

Not for nothing is it called the revolving door.
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Old 01-19-2009, 07:05 PM   #3
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Many of the incoming 3,300 presidential appointees will be in their twenties or thirties and hail from Ivy League universities.
Ugggg, that was a huge part of Clinton's administration and a huge source of problems.
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Old 01-19-2009, 07:08 PM   #4
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Yeah..one in particular. lol
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Old 01-19-2009, 07:12 PM   #5
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You are right, but I really wasn't thinking about that one. I was thinking more about some of the stories that were in a book called "Unlimited Access" by the man who was in charge of the security and background checks in the White House.
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Old 01-19-2009, 07:17 PM   #6
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Yeah I know.

I was just cracking a funny.
(I hope no one notices though. I'd hate word to get out that I actually do have a sense of humour after all)
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Old 01-19-2009, 07:18 PM   #7
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Don't worry - We all know better, Ali.
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Old 01-19-2009, 07:19 PM   #8
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Old 01-19-2009, 09:14 PM   #9
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I liked this euphemism:

Quote:
in spite of those institutions’ relatively less than top-flight academic reputations.
Dumb-ass god-botherers from the sticks, roughly.
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Old 01-21-2009, 08:58 PM   #10
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Dick Morris

The Obama presidency: Here comes socialism
By Dick Morris
Posted: 01/20/09 06:12 PM [ET]
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.


Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.


In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)


But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.


Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.


But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.


Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.


In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders — the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.


Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).

Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.


But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)


And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).


And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.


Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose “local” control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.


But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.


So Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.


But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of healthcare by the government, the surge of unionization and the crippling of talk radio.



Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage.

http://thehill.com/dick-morris/the-o...009-01-20.html
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Old 01-28-2009, 10:00 AM   #11
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Dick Morris, humph.

First of all, we have not had "free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire" capitalism for a long time. What we have is socialist corporatism. We have been bailing out rich corporations for decades. About every 10 years or so, some big catastrophe happens, and they get bailed out.

Many rich corporations are completely subsidized by the government. They get government funding to build things (like sports stadiums), they get it for their employees health care (WalMart), they get it for R&D (pharmaceuticals). But, WE do not share in their profits, even though WE subsidized them. That is not capitalism, so please, stop insulting people by claiming it is.

In addition, all those really smart CEOs and Wall Street people artificially manipulate the market to make money. Then we the people pay when their houses built of cards come falling down. If you or I did that, we would be thrown in prison for fraud. That is what happened with the housing market, that is what with energy prices and blackouts caused by Enron, that is what happened with gas prices last year, and who knows what else all those so called "smart people" have done that will ultimately cause damage to the rest of us, while they luxuriate under their golden parachutes, and tell us we are too dumb to understand what happened. (Frankly, I am wondering if THEY know what the hell they are doing. and we have left these people in charge? *scratches head*)

Wall Street and deregulation caused all this mess. But conservatives answer to everything is to lower taxes on rich corporations and the very top wealthy elite. Hmmmm, they fucked up royally, so let's give them even more money and allow them to keep running things. But... it doesn't work. We have tried it. Some big corporations actually pay no taxes. And they hide their profits offshore, so they don't pay taxes on that. Conservatives like to complain about "tax and spend" democrats, but republicans are addicted now to "lower taxes and spend" philosophy. They spend more, but tax less. So where are we supposed to get the money to pay for all that spending? At least democrats want to tax people who can afford it so people who can barely scrape by might be able to have a few more dollars in their pocket.

Another thing, rich people (you know, really rich people) are not going to spend any more than they do otherwise if you let them keep more of their money. They just won't. The middle class drives the economy. We have been doing trickle down economics for 40 years, and it doesn't work. Do you realize that now, the top 300 people in this country have more wealth than the rest put together? It's insane. Why does any one person need to have 60 billion dollars? That money would be better spent if it was in circulation. Our country is strongest when we have a large middle class, but our middle class is shrinking, because so many good jobs have gone bye bye. Now we are losing high paying engineering jobs as well. I have an idea, maybe we should outsource all those CEO and executive jobs instead, and keep the workforce jobs. Imagine how much money we could save, and how many people we could employ, if we did that.

We need to support small business. Yes, ther are big corporations that employee lots of people, but the bigger they get, the harder they fall. We have allowed some industries to become so big that they really control us. Like media. Congress keeps raising the limits on how many newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations any one person can own. That is dangerous. Seriously. Do you honestly think it is healthy for only a few voices to have control over what we hear and see? I don't. It limits us. And in the same vein, allowing one company to diversify to where it limits competition, that isn't healthy either. They get too much power. And, in the process, not only does it limit competition, it also lowers standards (look at Microsoft).

Regarding health care. Republicans have been on TV whining that we need to cut taxes for corporations so they can compete globally, because other countries have lower corporate taxes. Well, other countries also have government-sponsored health care, and that is huge cost to corporations here. But, republicans don't want to give government-sponsored health care to our people either. So, give us the health care, and maybe we would be more ammenable to lowering corporate taxes. But only when corporations are taxed properly. (you know, that offshore thing again, and other ways corporations get away with not paying taxes, and being subsidized in almost every way imaginable. I mean really, if taxpayer dollars are paying for that sports complex, they should share in the profits.)

Health care costs are out of control. I notice the costs have gone up astronomically, because of ADVERTISING. How is it not drug pushing if a pharmaceutical company advertises its drugs on tv? Maybe we really DO need to take control of everything, from banks to pharmaceutical cos, because honestly, in the long run, it would probably be more beneficial to society.

About Obama, he actually wants to go through the budget and cut waste. If it doesn't work, he has pledged to get rid of it, or make it more efficient. The spending he wants to do will create jobs in the short term, and are investments for the future in the long term. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and weak regulation of certain industries is costing us money, and damaging the environment. Not to mention our addiction to oil. Pumping money into infrastucture and green technology will create jobs now and is long term investment for our country. And putting reasonable regulations on business is a good thing.

Let's at least give the man a chance. He has been in office for a week. Let's give him some time. I don't like everything he's doing either, and I'm skeptical of some of it. But I also have hope. He's intelligent, and thoughtful, and he LISTENS. He has already taken some HUGE steps that seem very promising. It took 8 years of Bush to get here. It will take time and thought to get out of it.

And ftr, why is "socialism" such a bad thing? People in Europe and other countries seem to like it pretty well.

One last thought (I know this is long, I'm not usually this loquacious. ), I reeeally think we need repeal most of the drug laws. Espeically with regard to plants, like weed and mushrooms. I read the other day that pot is now the most profitable drug in the US. If we repealed the laws, and taxed it, imagine all the money we could bring in. Plus, it would start a whole new industry, and combat crime at the same time. If people could grow their own, or become a grower for profit, there would be no more drug wars, or illegal gangs to worry about. Of course, I also think prostitution should be legal, for many of the same reasons, and more, but that is another thread.
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Old 01-28-2009, 05:31 PM   #12
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Originally Posted by sugarpop View Post
Dick Morris, humph.

~Big Snip~ Of course, I also think prostitution should be legal, for many of the same reasons, and more, but that is another thread.
You forgot the walking on water part but I'm sure it was an innocent mistake
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Old 01-29-2009, 07:11 AM   #13
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You forgot the walking on water part but I'm sure it was an innocent mistake
oh, well, I didn't want to brag, but I do possess that talent...
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Old 01-26-2009, 08:23 PM   #14
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BEWARE OBAMA’S TROJAN HORSE
By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann 01.22.2009 Now that Obama is the president, fasten your seat belts. During his first year in office, and particularly during his first hundred days, we are about to witness the most prodigious output of legislation since 1981-2 (under Reagan), 1964-5 (under Johnson), and 1933-36 (under Roosevelt). The combination of top heavy Democratic majorities in Congress and a mood of public fear bordering on panic over the financial crisis and the looming depression will speed his legislation through a compliant Senate and House.

We will enter his Administration as the United States, buoyed by an aggressive free market economy. We will exit his first year - and even the first hundred days - as France, burdened with massive government regulation, a vast public sector, and permanent middle class entitlements. And Obama will take care to arrange things so that massive and permanent political change accompanies his and protects his legislative achievements in the future.


He will call this radical change a stimulus package. He will dress up a generation of liberal priorities as necessary steps to fight the economic crisis. His programs and policies won’t do much to end the depression. It will end only after the massive burden of debt is lifted from the shoulders of American and foreign households and companies, a process which will take years. At most, his stimulus will act as methadone while we withdraw from our debt addiction, mitigating the pain, smoothing over the trauma, and soothing our system.

But Obama’s strategy is to hide inside the Trojan Horse of stimulus an army of radical measures to change America permanently.

The most pernicious of his proposals will be the massive Make Work Pay refundable tax credit. Dressed up as a tax cut, it will be a national welfare program, guaranteeing a majority of American households an annual check to “refund” taxes they never paid. And it will eliminate the need for about 20% of American households to pay income taxes, lifting the proportion that need not do so to a majority of the voting population. Unlike the Bush stimulus checks, this new program will be a permanent entitlement, a part of our budget that can only go up and never down. Politically, it will transform a majority of Americans from taxpayers, anxious to hold down government spending, into tax eaters, eager to reap new benefits.

http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2009/...orse/#more-531
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Old 01-26-2009, 09:02 PM   #15
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That's a pretty bleak outlook.
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