Roberts Approved by Judiciary Committee 13-5
Let’s see who has a spine, shall we? Now, I don’t expect Democrats to support President Bush in everything he does, but clearly, John Roberts was just about the best a Democrat could possibly hope for in these circumstances. Therefore, it’s hard for me to imagine a credible argument for opposing him beyond partisan hackery.
So what Democrats had the, um, nerve to support Roberts? Leahy, Kohl, and (color me surprised) Feingold. The other five Democrats, the five who should hang their heads in unending shame, are:
Joe ‘Plagiarism’ Biden
Dianne ‘Ultra-Lib’ Feinstein
Ted ‘Involuntary Manslaughter’ Kennedy
Charles ‘Chuckie’ Schumer
Dick “Dick” Durbin
Five hacks, for the world to see…
In other good news, Rita has weakened to a Category 4…
And in really, really amazing news, the Kos gets Roberts right (sure, he says a lot of other stupid stuff before he gets to this, but still…):
…[U]ltimately, the Republicans have the White House and a solid majority in the Senate. If we want to stop the Roberts of the world in the future we have to do so at the ballot box. The Roberts battle was lost in 2004, 2002, and 2000.
Yep, you want a liberal Justice, win an election…
I don’t find Feingold all that surprising. He has a longstanding history of giving the president wide leeway on nominees as a matter of principle. He even voted to confirm Ashcroft. I realize it could be sticky for him if he’s going to run for president himself, but Feingold strikes me as an unusually principled and consistent senator.
Ryan, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on Feingold, as I’m not familiar with his overall voting record. I assumed he was more likely to not vote for Roberts because of his Kossack ties, but I guess they only or mostly find common ground in opposition to Iraq…
I don’t believe it. Kos made a sensible comment about the political process? Has the world gone completely mad??
Maybe he’s been reading our comments.
Has the far left ever helped any Democrat get elected? no. Did they help Bush in 2000? hell, yea…
Kos mouthing of ‘we have to win something’ is trite and redundant. It’s like a football coach telling his team to go out and win…without a plan or any talent.
The really funny thing about Dems is that they believe the lower approval numbers for Bush translate to increased Democratic popularity. They don’t.
People support ideas. Kos has none. This is the problem with the far left, too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Or in the case of Cindy Sheehan and her 35 protestors/(handlers), “All hat, no cattle.” Tip of the ten gallon to Ann Richards.
Bush’s low numbers are plausible.
Gas is up 50% since the election. Congress was on break(allowing dems to hide). Despite the progress in Iraq, with over 60,000 Iraqi troops trained and a pending election Oct 15 has fallen off the map. The market is stagnant, (except those small caps) in no small part due to raising interest rates. (Greenspan is still optimistic enough to do it…so something must be going well, and I haven’t heard any dems complain about it.)
Clinton’s biggest achievement? Everyone getting their 401k each year, and thinking it couldn’t get any better. Who would have thought that dems were really capitalists at heart? The myth of Clinton’s greatness extends no further than the optimism the middle-class had. Ask a dem to explain what policy of Clinton’s got the market moving and they’ll start sounding like Kos. No plan, no clue, no explanation.
All this hype about preparedness for natural disaster plays to Guilliani getting the nod in 2008. In seeking to run against Bush for 2008, they will be ill-prepared. The last thing the dems need is for a centrist conservative to get into office. Make that the second to last thing-behind HRC getting the nomination.
“All this hype about preparedness for natural disaster plays to Guilliani getting the nod in 2008.”
I couldn’t agreee more. This disaster has reminded millions of Americans why they admired Rudy so much in the wake of 9/11. And it also underscored that Giuliani’s task was a lot more difficult than he made it look in the wake of 9/11.
I’m not so surprised by Feingold — if you watched his questioning, it was entirely different that what was coming from Biden and Schumer and Kennedy. I actually thought we had a shot at getting either Biden or Schumer to cross over as well, and split the Dems evenly. But I’ll take it. There’s no chance Roberts will fail to be confirmed, now.
“Ask a dem to explain what policy of Clinton’s got the market moving and they’ll start sounding like Kos. No plan, no clue, no explanation”? So a free trade policy and a budget surplus had nothing to do with it? If the government doesn’t have to borrow money, then it doesn’t have to compete with private industry for capital…
I’m in between mark the lesser and peter on this one; I do think Clinton benefitted from great timing by just being the occupant of the White House during the dot-com boom, but I give him huge props for NAFTA, an act of political courage considering his
policyparty. Clinton was pretty receptive to the market for a Democrat, and those types of policies are in no small measure what earns the ire of the ‘progressives’ towards DLC Dems…Peter, I’ll give Clinton credit for a commitment to free trade (something his party has since abandoned), but the budget surplus was achieved by Newt Gingrich in the years 1993-97, fighting the Clinton White House every step of the way. If Clinton’s plans for healthcare and welfare had been implemented, the deficit would never again have fallen below half a trillion dollars, minimum.
On economic expansion, Clinton was basically, well, around. The ’92 mini-recession that he blasted Bush 41 for was largely over before the general campaign started, and the economy was on a downturn months before he left office.
Please don’t think my criticisms of Clinton imply an endorsement of Bush, incidentally. Fiscal policy isn’t exactly his forte.
Well, admittedly I am favorably disposed towards Clinton, but I would respond that it was under his watch so he deserves the credit (in addition to Gingrich, to the extent that he contributed). I also think that Rubin was an excellent Treasury Secretary and deserves a lot of credit for his policies and his credibility on Wall Street. Eight years is a long time for the relative prosperity we had under Clinton — I would argue that it has been unmatched since at least the eight years of the Eisenhower administration.
I give Clinton credit for pretty much leaving the economy to its own devices, which is the most effective thing most politicians can do. (Somehow we managed to do well even though Congress didn’t pass Clinton’s vaunted “stimulus package.” Anybody remember that?)
Now how much that was because he faced a Republican Congress that fought him out of habit on everything and how much was because of a fundamental instinct was to leave things alone I can’t say. The fact that he wanted to nationalize health care makes me think things would have been different with a more pliant Congress, but on the other hand, he seemed to learn his lesson but good after that, so it may have been his common sense. Either way, he deserves credit for what happened. And the Democrats today lose credit in my eyes when they argue against those two things, favoring trade walls and showing no great desire to cut spending.
(And that said, I think the Republicans have been awful about spending the last four years. The Democrats would have a better time arguing against Bush’s tax cuts if they could simultaneously point to something they’d like to cut spending on, aside from the Iraq War.)
Well, the Democrats may not be big advocates of cutting spending, but they seem more or less unanimous in calling for a rollback of the Bush tax cuts to reduce the deficit — if the choice is between tax-and-spend and borrow-and-spend, I would choose the former –
free trade policy-seems the dems are now against that and Bush is for it. I’d post the recent criticism of NAFTA by dems but…
Also considering that the prime rate was cut to nothing, having the same stimulus as the banking deregulation of Reagan…we blew our money in the 80′s on S&L’s, and then the tech bust in 99. Bush recieved a recession when he came into office, his budget wasn’t passed until the fall of 2001, but our economy was already stalled.
A free trade policy was bi-partisan. A budget surplus was a result of cutting our military size and intelligence budget. Our military is 1/3 the size it was during Gulf War 1. One of the other dirty secrets is that the US does not like to discuss how much it spends on intel, so when it had its cuts under Clinton, there was no comparison and no reporting.
The fact that tax revenue is up 15% from the previous year, is complete vindication of Supply siders.
I give Bill all the credit in the world for the reduction of our military/intel which led to the surplus-who’d have thought we’d have needed them?
http://money.cnn.com/2001/10/31/economy/economy/
This a bar graph of GDP, given that Clinton’s projection of Budget surpluses was based on the premise of about 4% growth, and the numbers don’t support the projection…
The myth of the budget surplus was a political creation supported by the press. To support my argument, I turn to another democratic Rhodes scholar-the architect of Reagan’s corporate tax reform in 1986…
Bill Bradley-
http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Bill_Bradley_Social_Security.htm
“Budget surplus is a fiction; separate social security
We must correct the fiction that we have a giant surplus. We don’t. The so-called surplus really consists of the payroll taxes that American workers have paid into the Social Security trust fund since 1983 (when the system changed) and that have been building up to pay our pensions when we retire. We should take that Social Security surplus out of the budget and put it over on the side. ”
That’s the problem with dems, no sense discussing reality. When you lost Bradley, you lost a lot more than one seat in the Senate.
Hate to triple post but…
“GORE: I’ve presided over the so-called reinventing government program to downsize our federal bureaucracy, including, more than any other, the Pentagon and the Defense Department. But even as we’ve kept our military strong, we’ve turned the biggest deficits into the biggest surpluses in history.”
Let’s see…he said this in 1999, attributing the deficit reduction to “more than any other, the Pentagon and the Defense Department.”
Now that is voodoo economics…
1) Free trade: if the Dems are against it now (some are, some aren’t), then those who oppose it are wrong. I’m for free trade, not necessarily for Democrats.
2) I would argue that the military should have been downsized — in fact, it could probably do just as well with even further reductions, such as the ships that the Navy doesn’t want which are being built to satisfy the political needs of incumbents rather than military need. The downsizing started under Reagan (remember the peace dividend?). This doesn’t deny that Clinton achieved a budget surplus with (in my opinion) much more responsible stewardship of the budget than Bush.
3) The prime rate was reduced under Clinton because, among other reasons, the government did not have to compete with private industry for capital. Less competition for capital leads to lower interest rates.
4) On the same subject: the fed funds rate continued to decline under Bush. The implication of saying that “The fact that tax revenue is up 15% from the previous year, is complete vindication of Supply siders” is that a healthier economy was the result of supply side economics. Why isn’t the (arguably) healthier economy due to the after-effects of the continued easing by the Fed?
5) Gore’s point is very well taken, but you are moving the goalposts. If you did not treat the Social Security surplus as a discrete and separate item, then the government as a whole probably ran a deficit in the late 90′s. However, this sort of pro forma accounting is how government deficits have always been quantified — if you applied the same test to Bush, then his deficits would be commensurately larger than the (shameful) $400+ billion that they are today.
Mark – No doubt Feingold and the Kossacks have a fair amount in common. Feingold is a hardcore lefty, but he’s also a principled one. He voted no on the PATRIOT Act, no on Iraq, and (I think) no on the Iraq pork-barrel supplementation bill (OMG are trps nede armr!).
Ryan, at least he’s consistent and principled, then…obviously, I don’t expect everyone in the world to agree with me, but if they disagree, it’s nice to know it’s for a better reason than that I’m a Republican…
Feingold was also the only Democrat who voted against Senator Byrd’s “Motion to Dismiss” in the Clinton impeachment trial. Feingold was also most likely the “anonymous” Senator Christopher Hitchens mentioned in his book about the impeachment saga (“No One Left to Lie To”) that was initially leaning towards impeachment on the Obstruction of Justice count, only to be browbeaten by his colleauges at the last minute.
Feingold is a generally principled guy and is probably the only unabashed lefty I genuinely like. Still, I would never EVER vote for him for President, and I suspect he would make an abysmal candidate if the Democrats gave him the nod.
Now you got me wanting to read No One Left to Lie To again…