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32,000,000The number of people who will now be covered by healthcare by PRIVATE insurance companies if the new healthcare bill passes the House.
Wow - that's some socialist takeover of our healthcare system!
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression."--Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA) on March 19.
Another moron Republican from the south, demonstration once again the coherence and intelligent alternatives to President Obama's healthcare proposals.
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Facts & Quotes are updated weekly, or as close as I can get.
LAWYERLY LINGO
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I've got plenty, and I do mean plenty, to say on the Russian/Georgia conflict when I have more time later on this evening. However, for now, I couldn't resist commenting on this absolutely ridiculous, absurd assertion made by McCain a few days ago.
So, let's get this straight, the conflict in Georgia is the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War? Hmmkay - so I guess the Rwandan genocide, the famine and slaughter in Somalia, the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, not to mention the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don't qualify in McCain's mind. (I guess if he wasn't running for president when those things took place, they didn't qualify as a crisis in his mind.)
Seriously, this guy is either unwilling or unable to remember more than three months in the past, or he has absolutely no problem with telling blatant lies and wild distortions to the American people. You decide, but it's one or the other.
If anything, the War in Iraq definitely qualifies - we have created one of the biggest refugee crises in the world, to the tune of more than four million Iraqis, many of whom have left the country altogether.
No one mixes political analysis and humor better than Jon Stewart. In fact, he's the best in the business. The above clip is the gold standard. (Watch the vid, and you'll get the pun.)
Anyway, I really got a good laugh out of this clip; stick with it, it's a little over nine minutes, but it's one of the best I've seen on The Daily Show in quite some time.
Hearing the words come out of McCain's mouth about how he'll balance the budget, win in Iraq, find and kill bin Laden, etc. is high comedy at its greatest. Don't get me wrong, I certainly hope all of those things will happen, but just saying you'll do it without offering specifics is Saturday Night Live-sketch worthy, and definitely fodder for The Daily Show.
I've been writing for a long time now that "winning" in Iraq is a myth. Even if we "win" as politicians define it (and I still don't know what that is), we've lost. And by that I mean trillions spent (before it's all said and done), thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and for what? So we could get cheap oil, which isn't happening, anyway. I tire of typing this over and over, but it does bear repeating, since the right sees fit to keep propagating lie after lie after lie about why we invaded in the first place and why we should stay there. I don't buy any of it.
As far as balancing the budget, George Stephanopoulos was totally right to take McCain to task - he's proposing massive tax cuts, in addition to "winning" the War in Iraq. An economist it does not take to figure out that his math is, how shall I say it? - Creative. This year, we are going to have a $600-700 billion deficit, and that's without any more tax cuts. And Brain McCain is going to reverse all of those losses and balance the budget?!? I LOVE it when McCain tells Stephanopoulos "Look, I'll find you $100 billion tomorrow." One, that's patently absurd, and two, he probably could - but not a dime would come from the Pentagon. But, we could say goodbye to lots of other social and educational programs, to be sure, which McCain and the GOP have been trying to do for years.
It also should be lost on no one how the media is simply pimping and recycling McCain's talking points over and over and over, too. McLame puts out an attack ad calling Obama "arrogant," and the next thing you know, media talking heads the world over are repeating it like the drones that they are. Stewart is right on point here, too; anyone running for president has to have a certain amount of arrogance in him or her, without question. I don't know who's currently "winning" the Arrogance War between the two (nor do I care), but hearing McCain boast about how he "knows how to win wars" strikes me as blatantly arrogant, dismissive of alternate strategies, and, quite frankly, a total lie. As has been mentioned here and on countless other blogs (God only knows no one in the mainstream media has enough sac to ask him) -- "Name a war you've even remotely been in that's won, Senator." Anyone who did have the temerity to ask him to his face would most likely get that creepy smile and stare, and then a deflected answer (McCain has elevated that to an art form).
Probably my two favorite parts of this clip, though, are when McCain vows to pursue Obama to the "gates of hell," and then he just stares blankly ahead, with that creepy, plastic smile (at about the 7:20 mark); and when he says that he would not invade Pakistan because "it is a sovereign nation." And Iraq was... WHAT?
These videos keep getting better and better, and it doesn't get old posting them. Last night on Countdown, Rachel Maddow (one of my favorite liberal radio talk show hosts) was filling in for Keith Olbermann, but the McCain mendacities don't take vacation. Again and again and again, McCain denies having ever admitted that he's not a whiz on the economy, when plenty of video exists out there that he had done just that, multiple times.
As Rosa Brooks of the LA Times points out, it's not an egregious sin to admit that you aren't an economics wonk, but to deny having ever having said that suggests three things (and perhaps a combination of all three): 1. He's flat-out lying, 2. He doesn't believe that people like Maddow and Olbermann (or common folk) will take the time to find out his statements to the contrary, or 3. He just doesn't remember (just what we need, another Ronald Reagan, i.e. ("I don't recall...")).
What's worse is the people who McCain is surrounding himself with for economic advice: former Senator Phil Gramm, who has more than a few ties to the mortgage crisis, as well as our energy crisis; Alan Greenspan, a brilliant man but also one who must share at least partial blame for the mortgage crisis that is crippling Middle America; and Carly Fiorina, a woman I have a lot of respect and admiration for, but also a woman who didn't exactly turn Hewlett Packard into the next Microsoft, to be kind.
To sum it all up, McCain is downright clueless on economic matters, admits it, then denies it, and who surrounds himself with people almost as clueless as he is. If McCain is a cure for the deep recession that the economy is in, then attaching leeches to an HIV patient will cure AIDS.
