Somehow I have an odd feeling that Bush’s view of how things are is just a tad different than what his subjects, er, um, fellow Americans think it is. After all, if your job has gone overseas, your investments are wiped out as the stock market tanks, your house payments are in default, your three year old can’t get on a plane because his name is the same as a suspected terrorist, and you can’t afford to fill your tank with gas that was half the price when you wisely voted for Bush The Decider last time, you should be happy because the Surge is working!
Economy, War To Dominate State of Union
For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation’s strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.
That is the problem Bush faces as he prepares to deliver his seventh and probably final State of the Union address tonight.
[…]
“Very large segments of the American people have written him off already and have moved on to the next chapter,” said Jeremy Rosner.
Problem would be also you get a bunch of people who don’t know WTF they are talking about (or just ill-informed) spewing out junk that someone will believe. (sounds like a couple of bloggers I have read before) Just cause Bush has no right to speak doesn’t mean Joe Average should take his place.
As the Congressman from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich said last week, “The State of the Union is a lie!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB9TSVOoHqc
As with any president. George W will be remembered for the bad things and not the good. I do see a trend that the recent presidents have not been remembered for anything really good that they have done. Probably Ronald Reagan was the last fondly remembered president. Bush could have saved face by changing course on Iraq and putting more emphasis on our nations economy and infrastructures. Too many presidents focus too much on foreign problems!! I will be surprised if our next president does not face the same demise in ratings if domestics problems are not resolved.
I agree that the “average” American would not have the same priorities as W – but I bet if you set down and talked with your own Congressional Rep they would tell you “how things are” as they perceive them – that the Average Joe can’t see the “big picture”. You have to “go along to get along” and all of that BS.
Washington, D C has lost touch with the American people. Plain and simple.
The Federal government is about obtaining and holding on to power!
Not at all interested in what the monkey has to say. ZERO interest
I find it interesting that the Washington Post is, apparently, not entirely sure that Bush is going to leave office.
“…probably final State of the Union…”
The DailyKos and HuffPoh think they represent the US Public. Just imagine the biased and misleading comments they would put into the speech.
Pollyanna-repulo-fascists everything is fine if you look at it from a different angle say, BushCo’s. Its just fringe nut job Kossack’s who will try and remember all the minuscule bad things about the BushCo. years and give them priority.
Look around everything is fine. Look at the long list of good things they have done…
Bush only makes two kinds of public comments: ones that have been carefully prepared for him in advance, and ones that make him sound like an idiot. The one thing they all have in common is that they bear only a distant relation to reality.
I predict a virtually content-free speech tonight.
For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation’s strong economic performance
Because rich guys getting richer while poor and middle class people stagnate or decline isn’t what “average” people think of as strong economic performance.
We haven’t seen a strong economy since the late 90s.
I’m a political news junky and I watch “everything.” Not interested in BushieBoy’s warped view–unless the receiver strapped to his back breaks down, that would be fun to see. No, the summary and clips will be too much on their own.
Seems to me, if you don’t swallow the neo-con’s BS hook, line, and sinker, then you simply don’t support the troops!!!!!
What would happen if the President had a “State of the Union” speech, and nobody showed up?
My predictions of what he will say:
– The ecomony is fine.
– The war in Iraq is going fine
– We need to cut taxes on coprorations
– We need to abo.. obol.. provitize Social Security
– We need to allow the health insurance companies write the new health care program, since they can give the most lovin to the women
– We need to make anything he did or said retractively legal, and anyone that he told to do stuff retrotractivaly legal.
– New rule… you are considered guilty until you can prove you are innocent.
#9 and #12
If Aaron Sorkin, William F Buckley, and George Stephanopolis wrote the State Of The Union AND adopted a rule that restricted the verbiage to words of only three syllables of less, the inbred, coke-fiend, Jesus junkie, Daddy’s Boy, not-my-muther-fukkin president, asshat George Bush would still find a way to make it sound like an audition monolog for a new version of a Dukes of Hazzard TV series.
(They would also be better than me at avoiding run-on sentences)
Problem is, we really do need to cut taxes on corporations. We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world.
Does anyone think corporations actually pay taxes? No, they pass that price on to you, the consumer. You pay their taxes whenever you buy an item. Therefore a decrease in corporate taxes, means a decrease in prices. It’s Econ 101.
The economy is in a slump. It’s not a recession because we haven’t had two consecutive quarters of negative growth….yet. We probably will in the coming quarters. The increased trade deficit (partially due to corporate taxes) and the housing crisis (partially due to banks taking advantage of people that don’t understand ARM) have taken us to where we are. Bush had little to do with either. His entire fault just lies in the fact that he never met a spending bill he didn’t like.
The war in Iraq has no solution. If we pull out, millions will die (a la Cambodia), if we stay…we lose trickling of soldiers and the situation never improves. Catch-22
Of course, that’s just my state of the union address…prepared in advance.
Calin–answer me this. I agree we should lower the tax on corporations, (or maybe raise the tax they actually pay?) in order to be competitive.
Now–I’ve been wondering for 8-10 years why the GOUSA doesn’t go with Universal Healthcare in order to releave the corporations of their strangulating healthcare costs. It would immediately make all manufacturing concerns more competitive==everyone except insurance companies should be for it.
How come this hasn’t happened?
I agree we should lower the tax on corporations, (or maybe raise the tax they actually pay?) in order to be competitive.
I’m not sure if you can raise a tax they actually pay. No matter what name you put it under, any tax cost is automatically passed on as a cost of production…which effects the bottom line prices.
As for medical care…
I don’t know if universal health care is the answer. The reason I say this, is we already spend more than any other developed nation on health care…and yet our coverage is crap. Why is this?
I don’t think having the government in charge is necessarily the answer. We have to look into the root cause of the prices and fix that. If prices remain the same way they are, the government can’t afford universal health care.
Of course, part of the root cause is John “The man of the little people” Edwards. But it would be too simplistic to blame the whole thing on our litigious society.
I just don’t know if I trust the government not to screw it up like it has just about everything else in my lifetime. That pre-dates Bush by a large degree btw. I’ve seen Dems and Repubs come and go in power…all of them are crooks. It’s the nature of first-past-the-post democracy. We have two broker parties who’s entire focus is accumulating and holding as much money/power as possible. Letting them run health care seems like a mistake.
#16–Calin–the government is running healthcare, perhaps more indirectly now with the gross inefficiencies of competing for profits and siphoning middlemen, than running it directly a la VA, Medicare, or Congress’s own plan?
But the main point is missed. Even more expensive bad healthcare from the government would make all employers more competitive.
Nothing is perfect or without flaws. To offer nothing more than that concern is to not address the issue.
Even more expensive bad healthcare from the government would make all employers more competitive.
Not really. Considering we can’t afford more expensive anything at the moment, that money’s gotta come from somewhere. Those that are touting universal healthcare have already aimed and fired at raising taxes on the evil corporations. They will take the same amount in taxes from you and me (increasing the demand for offshore goods) costing local industries millions in order to pay for universal health care.
What we have now is businesses paying for health care…that cost, of course passed to the consumer. What we would have then is businesses being taxed for the government to pay for health care…that cost, of course, passed to the consumer. The only difference is one is more expensive in the long run…and covers more people.
It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul.
What we need to do is cut the margins and find a way to effect bottom line pricing in the medical industry. Increase availability of state paid health care (medicaid) while trimming fat from these services (bureaucratic middlemen etc). Likewise provide real solutions for business owners in tougher spots. Give higher tax breaks for businesses that set up shop in poorer areas of the country…as long as they offer good insurance for employees.
These, of course, are short-term while we find a way to better regulate and mediate prices in the industry as a whole. Might want to think of limiting malpractice suits (Hi again Mr. Edwards).
All this “Let’s not Tax corporations” is fine and dandy, until you end up with situations like the Oil companies, with just one company making 40 Billion dollars in profit per quarter, charging us monopoly rates, and getting all kinds of tax exemptions. The tax consequences for them are ridiculously low.
Never watched a speech by this president and won’t watch this one either.
#14 – Does anyone think corporations actually pay taxes? No, they pass that price on to you, the consumer. You pay their taxes whenever you buy an item. Therefore a decrease in corporate taxes, means a decrease in prices.
BS. Corps currently use very creative accounting to skirt their tax liability anyway, but even if you lift the burden allowing for lower prices, all you will really do is allow for increased profits.
Henry Ford’s idealistic idea of creating the best possible product at the cheapest possible price while paying the highest possible wage is not how we do business. We create whatever crap we can, charging the highest price we can, while outsourcing all our jobs to China other some other cheap labor market.
Corporations are not our friends. They have no loyalty to communities or nations. They exist to perform one task and one task only… to extract your money into their shareholder’s pockets, with as little fuss as possible between those two points.
The economy is in a slump. It’s not a recession because we haven’t had two consecutive quarters of negative growth….yet. We probably will in the coming quarters.
If a baseball player had a slump for as long as this economy has been in a slump, he’d be retired. There are more economic indicators of poor performance than just how much stockholders make. People matter. And people have been suffering since mid to late 2000.
The increased trade deficit (partially due to corporate taxes) and the housing crisis (partially due to banks taking advantage of people that don’t understand ARM) have taken us to where we are.
Let’s quit acting like the housing market is entirely the fault of doofus’s buying too much house.
Many homeowners in a crunch could afford their homes just fine when they bought them, but the miserable economy has left them a day late and a dollar short as the value of their real income has been in decline compared to everything else. The price of everything has gone up… except income. Even if they have seen increase, compared to inflation, they are losing.
Bush had little to do with either.
Some people think the President has no impact on the economy. Some Republicans think only Democratic presidents have an impact, and vice versa… But the President is, to use the colloquial, “the man”. As Truman said, “the buck stops here.” Bush may want to change that to, “the buck stops somewhere in the basement of my opposition’s office building”, but that ain’t so.
Bush has rejected any and all advice regarding the economy except for the advice that directly puts wealth in the pockets of his base constituency. He’s a greed driven, corrupt hack for corporate special interests, and a silver spoon baby who has benefits entirely through nepotism.
Yes. A lot of this is Bush’s fault.
#16 – I don’t know if universal health care is the answer. The reason I say this, is we already spend more than any other developed nation on health care…and yet our coverage is crap. Why is this?
Because the corporations who handle the dispersement are not concerned with out health. They are concerned with their vacation mansions on the beach.
We have a working model for Universal Health care, and it is government administrated, and it is called Medicare. It operates more efficiently than any other health care program, public or private, that there is.
——–
Where is the money gonna come from?
While I can think of a dozen ways to raise the money, we can start by not spending a few trillion on this bullshit meatgrinder in the desert.
#21 – Somebody really should give me a stern warning about the length of some of my posts. I mean cripes! Who’s got time to read my lunatic fringe drivel?
Seriously… Sorry… I think I like typing more than writing some days.
#22–OFTLO==only at your invitation, YES, I will criticize the generally short expositions of your well held positions.
Good example for all who read just how to compose a thoughtful argument rather than a bold unsupported statement.
We all sit at your feet asking for MORE!!!!
#23 – Do I detect sarcasm?
If so, it’s likely well deserved.
If not, what are you smoking and can I share?
Honestly, with rare exception, I post when I’m at work to relieve the tedium of a well-hated job. In the not too distant future I’ll not work here (praise no god) and I’ll hopefully not have time to post (which I honestly like doing) because I’ll actually be interested in working.
It’s weird. I’ve had a very strong work ethic most of my life… but when the company I last worked for closed up their local operations and left me stranded in this god-forsaken place, I took a job here at X.
X is an industry leader in their kind of tech related field, but the job is… well… how do I say this… gouge out my eyes boring.
This job has two disadvantages. 1) it’s mind numbingly repetitive and simple (and its a “knowledge worker” job, if you can believe that), and 2) it is too easy to slack. I find myself in the odd position of being both essential (the job, not so much me) to the company and yet having no meaningful impact on the company. I actually love the company but as yet, no positions in other departments have opened up that I would find more challenging and subsequently interesting. I’m not underpaid. I’m treated well. It’s just too damn easy and too damn boring.
So I post.
It’s all Bush’s fault.
#24–OFTLO==my post is honest==just knowingly complimentary in this adverse world. I have found every job I ever had as interesting at the time. Problem is, I had some very bad jobs–first one was shoveling chicken shit==but it was my first job, outside, and throwing shit and eggs at my friends was “fun.” The the good old Post Office–again–fun racing mail trucks with my confreres.
And then college and adult work==whatever it was, I never got bored.
My father told me only a few things one of which was “Boredom is the product of a dull mind.” Whenever I detected boredom–I tried to do something to liven it up===but I was so good at it, I hardly ever detected the boredom to start with. Now, I did pick peaches–but only for 3 days. That job hurt before it got boring?
Find the good, ignore the bad==has to be done in all situations==AND==you already found one outlet==but are you anonymous? Most employers don’t monitor websurfing until some issue comes up==then they check and use whatever they find as an excuse or supporting info? You know that already==don’t be so bored you self destruct?
How come I never got bored? OH–sure I was bored at times. I recall sitting on alert in the USAF. Just sitting around? Well–I looked forward to the fun stuff.
#25 – I’m a geek. Thus, I’m friends with the IT security guy. I can surf triple X hot plus size girl on guy on barnyard animal porn and get away with it… But I don’t because I just don’t want to be seen crying like a baby at work.
It isn’t a bad job for a less engaged person. I’m trying to wedge my way into marketing, where the creative work happens. I also whore myself out to engineering in small doses to help them with technical writing tasks sometimes. I can’t do that too much or they’ll think, hell, just use him but don’t pay him.
I have exactly two responsibilities. And I need half the time I have to do them, but I need to be here all them time in case anyone wants something done… There is never any difference between the days, hours, or minutes. It’s just… Do Task A or Task B or surf the web.
I’m doing Task C now… which is spamming Monster, etc., in hopes of finding a job in Chicago. If I hated the company or my boss or co-workers, this would be easy. But I like everything except my actual role here… So I hate looking for the back door. But I have to. It just isn’t healthy to be this disengaged.
I guess there are people who would love a brain dead job. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to think about. That’s why there is a customer service department. But I’m not that guy.
#26–I did forget to add a safety valve for me==always recognize any situation can be better or worse.
So, if you had the same job with people you didn’t like==what would you do? You could do that. If you like the people==actually cultivate the friendship?–Start a bowling league, poker club, book reading club etc.
Jobs in the main are not supposed to be fun or rewarding==thats why you get paid money to do it. Most jobs are also dead ended with no career path. Not always==just usually.
Lets see. Recalling now when I was on alert==most guys slept or took college courses or played pool. I tended to read the tech books to learn the airplane better than most. Only so much reading you can do though.
You are a bright guy–don’t stew around, think about and try various solutions. Dont be a dullard.
dogIAX Cool, bro!