Good Grief!!!!

The Gospel According to Grover


All we have to do is replace Obama. We are not auditioning for fearless leader, Norquist told attendees at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

And in the same speech, he pretty well shrugged off concern about who the GOP’s presidential candidate would be in November, saying: Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.

The Kochs, the American Legislative Exchange Council (fondly referred to as ALEC) and Norquist are bonded by an anti-middle American zealotry. ALEC's far right on-demand legislative proposals have all the uniqueness of fast-food menus across the nation: they are stamped out on a conveyor belt with the same uniformity, precision, and toxicity as the beef patties on your Double Whopper.

Translation: The Kochs and Grover Norquist tell ALEC to craft a protect-the-rich bill they want introduced in the House; ALEC happily complies and hands it off to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor; Cantor brings the bill up for vote and the Tea Party Congress and (they anticipate for 2013) Senate pass said bill with little or no opposition and a puppet president with enough working fingers signs it. Viola

Remember eight years of Bush and six years of a republican congress.

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

Economists would cite many reasons why presidential terms are an imperfect frame for tracking economic trends. The business cycle doesn't always follow the electoral cycle. A president's economic record is heavily influenced by factors out of his control. Timing matters and so does good fortune.

But few would argue that national economic policy is irrelevant to economic outcomes. And rightly or wrongly, voters still judge presidents and their parties largely by the economy's performance during their watch. In that assessment, few measures do more than the Census data to answer the threshold question of whether a president left the day to day economic conditions of average Americans better than he found it.

If that's the test, today's report shows that Bush flunked on every relevant dimension-and not just because of the severe downturn that began last year.

Consider first the median income. When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income-the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below-stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That's a decline of 4.2 per cent.

That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The median household income increased during the two terms of Clinton (by 14 per cent, as we'll see in more detail below), Ronald Reagan (8.1 per cent), and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (3.9 per cent). As Mishel notes, although the global recession decidedly deepened the hole-the percentage decline in the median income from 2007 to 2008 is the largest single year fall on record-average families were already worse off in 2007 than they were in 2000, a remarkable result through an entire business expansion. "What is phenomenal about the years under Bush is that through the entire business cycle from 2000 through 2007, even before this recession...working families were worse off at the end of the recovery, in the best of times during that period, than they were in 2000 before he took office," Mishel says.

Bush's record on poverty is equally bleak. When Clinton left office in 2000, the Census counted almost 31.6 million Americans living in poverty. When Bush left office in 2008, the number of poor Americans had jumped to 39.8 million (the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.) Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008.

if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?

if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?

I love the way the Left on A2K take it as proven fact that the GOP, and their stooges on the Supreme Court stole the election from Gore.

This opinion has so inculcated your tribal history that we find you here discussing it as if it were The Flood of 1927.

No one familiar with the jurisprudence of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas could possibly have imagined that they would vote to invalidate the Florida recount process on the basis of their own well-developed and oft-invoked approach to the Equal Protection Clause.

[T]he decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.

There is a fault in your thinking Finn.
One can disagree with the court's decision like Joe does but
that doesn't mean that Bush would have won. It only means the
recount would have gone forward.

Personally, I think they should have allowed the recount but
based on history of recounts the leader at the time, Bush, probably would have won the recount.

TALK ABOUT BEATING A DEAD HORSE!