Democrats charging that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be using foreign money to fuel election efforts: Murphy said he's "never complained about that" but wants a "firewall" to prevent foreign money from influencing U.S. elections. He said Fitzpatrick "doesn't mind these shadow groups." Fitzpatrick said the "shadow groups" running political commercials on channels 3, 6 and 10 are labor unions. He called it "unAmerican" to attack the Chamber for following its First Amendment right.A typical Mikey response – well, guess what…it turns out that people are paying attention to this story, as well they should (here).
Fitzpatrick isn’t the only one trying to stifle a yawn over the matter of foreign companies quite probably paying for political attack ads (I say “quite probably” since the Chamber of Commerce is stonewalling on the matter). The Philadelphia Inquirer also opined as follows today on the subject (here)…
President Obama acted irresponsibly at Democratic rallies, including one Sunday in Germantown, when he warned about foreign bogeymen buying U.S. elections.I realize that the Inky is a little “behind the curve” on this story, so here and here are the latest developments (and by the way, Chamber apologists, please don’t waste my time with comparisons between the spending of the Chamber and the Sierra Club – let me know when the latter starts running attack campaign ads, OK?).
"Groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections, and they won't tell you where the money for their ads comes from," Obama said.
The White House has no proof that foreign money is playing any role in this election, and presidential adviser David Axelrod admitted as much. But that hasn't stopped top Democrats from fearmongering as a last resort leading up to Election Day.
This also gives me an opportunity to link back to this prior post
Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.I think these findings are bizarre; I cannot fathom how anyone but the most jaded partisan would think that, somehow, the Dems are more extreme than the party of Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Joe Miller, John Raese, and Christine (Yes, Wiccan!) O’Donnell.
This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.
As you keep reading the Hill post, though, you find out the following…
The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.And yep, you guessed it – the “Schoen” would be Doug, who, as noted here, appeared at a fundraiser for Republican John Gomez of New York – so, given that the latter revealed his true ideological colors, the least I can do is provide a link for Gomez’s opponent, Dem Steve Israel, here.
We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment.In fact, as noted here, the deficit Obama inherited was more like $1.3 trillion. And it doesn’t do any good, I realize, to try explaining to “Clap” Hanson that Obama is a disciple of Milton Friedman, not Keynes.
But the popular uproar pales in comparison to the sense of humiliation over the fact that we are quite broke. In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits. The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration and small-government Republican Congress, the deficit nearly doubled, from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion, in just eight years.
President Obama apparently never figured out that he had been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people. So he took Bush's last scheduled budget deficit of more than $500 billion and - in a Keynesian attempt to get the country out of the 2008 recession and financial panic - nearly tripled it.
As noted here, though…
Anyone who looks at the evidence will find what we found: There is very little to suggest that the public wants Washington to focus on the deficit or debt right now. A couple of polls do indicate that concern over the deficit is greater than concern over the economy and jobs. But the great majority of polls show that the public is far more worried about the economy's weakness than it is about America's large public debt.And I would ask that you keep this in mind as we take a trip back in time to 2004, just after Number 43 was re-elected (more or less, not completely counting Ohio, which is what happened), to here, in which Hanson said the following…
At its richest, most populous stage in its history, the United States, after reeling from a devastating blow to its financial and military nerve centers, in less than three years toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, implemented elections in Afghanistan and scheduled them in Iraq, prevented another 9/11-like attack — and so far has tragically lost about 1,100 in combat in a war against a virulent fascism that is antithetical to every aspect of Western liberty.“At its richest, most populous stage in its history,” huh (and yes, I’ll admit that that’s some terrible sentence construction)?
Meanwhile, in the world of reality, we learn the following from about that same time (here)…
The budget deficit has ballooned under Bush, slipping back into the red from the surpluses of the late 1990s. The Congressional Budget Office says that the deficit will hit $422 billion in 2004. That's a record dollar amount, and represents 3.6 percent of GDP.(And by the way, given what Obama ended up inheriting, that shortfall estimate was pretty spot-on.)
Bush, who did not veto one spending bill in his first term, campaigned on a pledge to cut the deficit in half over the next five years by growing the economy and limiting discretionary spending. That may not be easy.
Many economists say that Bush's spending proposals, combined with his desire to make permanent the tax cuts of recent years, mean that the numbers simply don't add up.
"There will have to be much more significant restraint on spending growth than we've seen over the last four or five years," says Tim O'Neill, chief economist at Harris Bank.
In fact, the anti-deficit Concord Coalition calculates that Bush's proposals would worsen the ten-year shortfall by $1.33 trillion.
"Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush has refused to calibrate his drive for lower taxes with his support for expensive initiatives such as the global war on terrorism and a major expansion of Medicare," the group concludes. "There is no reason to expect anything different in a second term."
What? No whining about “national reputation and sense of self” in 2004 from “The Pericles of Petticoat Junction,” as James Wolcott calls Hanson? No pontificating about how “(the) bleak reality creates hopelessness - and anger - among voters”?
Victor Davis Hanson established a long time ago that he doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs, particularly on the subject of combat. He has now established that he doesn’t know anything about the economy either.
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