Franken Wins! (Now what?)

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Tiassa, Jun 30, 2009.

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  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    I wouldn't go so far as to say sanitized

    I don't think it's so much sanitized as the facts that (A) the article is long enough as it is; (B) Coleman's exploits might deserve an article of their own, and whether The New Yorker wishes to undertake that is up to them; and (C) the article was about Senator Franken, not the man he replaced.

    To the other—

    —Calapinto did cover that. Sort of. Maybe not the spirit of the maneuver, but the basic fact.
     
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  3. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Bailout and stimulus are two different things. And the stimulus was something like 700 billion not a trillion.
     
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  5. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    :shrug:

    Then perhaps I stand corrected.

    Geoff
     
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  7. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

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    Please enlighten us as to the Difference, and were the money has gone to, and the good that it has done.

    Yes, when you take the U-1 through U-6 numbers the unemployment rate is some were around 18%.

    http://blog.al.com/businessnews/2009/06/obama_unemployment_to_rise_nee.html

    Obama made the promise;

    In January, Obama's economic team predicted unemployment would rise no higher than 8 percent with the help of $787 billion in new government spending. The unemployment rate in May reached a 25-year high of 9.4 percent. Obama aides have said that the economy took a turn for the worse since their initial forecast.

    And then crawfished with this;

    "At that point, nobody understood what the depths of this recession were going to look like," Obama said. "If you recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a report that the economy had tanked. And so it's not surprising, then, that we missed the mark in terms of our estimates of where unemployment would go."

    After shouting from the Roof Tops during the election that;

    Obama: U.S. in worst crisis since Depression​

    Tue Oct 7, 2008 9:12pm EDT

    NASHVILLE, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Tuesday that the United States is in the worst financial crisis of the Great Depression as he opened a debate with Republican rival John McCain.​


    Yes, and now they want to say they didn't realize that it was the worst economy since the great depression, and it is His watch now and has been for 7 months.


    Yes please explain the difference.
     
  8. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    There is a big difference. The bailout money was created under george II to keep the financial system in tact. You may not understand that we have a globally intergrated financial system. A collapse of one financial insitution could cause the failure of tens of thousands of other businesses. That is a crisis by any definition. That is why the bailout money was necessary.

    Where is the bailout money? Most of it is nothing more than an accounting entry on a bank balance sheet. If you are not familar with banking, bank balance sheets are critical as assets determine how much money a bankcan loan.

    It is possible that the government may even make a profit on the bailout program. And in any case, it will get most of the money back down the road.

    The stimulus money is intended to keep the economy moving...keep people employed and build confidence in the economy. The problem with the current stimulus package is that it has not been spent. Only 10 percent of the total has been spent. It is not easy to spend that much money quickly.

    Economic slow downs are very difficult to predict. Not even the markets can really predict what will happen when. That is why you see such huge movements in the stockmarkets.

    Obama did not promise unemployment would not rise above 8 percent. He said he did not expect it to move about 8 percent. Beleive it or not there is a big difference between the two statements.

    As for the state of the economy being the worst since the Great Depression, show me someone who says otherwise. It is universally recognized that this is indeed the worst economy since the Great Depression.

    Unemployment numbers are bad, but nowhere near 18 percent. This is just more right wing hype which I find strange because the cause of high unemployment is Republican policy and administration.

    The other good thing about Obama is that he undestand things can and do change . That is why his team meets monthly and continually reevaluates its decisions and the current state of affairs. If they find they made a mistake, unlike past Republican administrations, they are willing to admit mistakes and make corrections. Obama has said all along he will likely make some mistakes but he also committed to fixing his mistakes just as fast as possible.
     
  9. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Wonking where no Democrat has wonked before?

    Ah, yes. A thread about Sen. Franken must necessarily turn into another "Buffalo hates Obama" rap. How predictable.

    Of course, it's early, so Franken hasn't had much time to cause trouble. Still, though, he made an impression at the Sotomayor hearing:

    But Franken also hit serious notes, reading from a pocket Constitution, asking Sotomayor about the Voting Rights Act; whether Internet access should be protected; asking for the definition of an activist judge.

    He even went where the administration didn't want Democrats to go by pressing the judge on abortion rights -- arguing that abortion rights don't have to be written into the Constitution to be protected.

    "Are the words 'birth control' in the Constitution?" Franken asked. Sotomayor responded, "No, sir."

    Franken then pressed the judge: "Are the words 'privacy' in the Constitution or the word?" Sotomayor said the word "privacy" is not.

    But the watercooler moment of the hearing came when he asked the judge -- who'd revealed she's a lifelong fan of the TV show "Perry Mason" -- to name one case Mason lost. She couldn't.

    "And you don't remember that case?" he asked.

    Sotomayor responded: "I know that I should remember the name of it, but I haven't looked at the episode."

    Franken followed up with this tongue-in-cheek question: "Didn't the White House prepare you for that?"


    (Yellin)

    And Amy Schatz, blogging for the Wall Street Journal, noted that Franken out-wonked his Senate colleagues. Really? Can you say that?

    Franken turned to the contentious issue of net neutrality, or rules that would require cable and phone companies to treat legal Internet traffic equally and would prevent the creation of a two-tiered system that would allow speedier deliver of premium services.

    Public interest groups have pressed Congress to pass explicit rules requiring net neutrality since it’s not entirely clear the FCC has authority to prevent Internet providers from blocking or delaying some Internet traffic. A federal appeals court is currently considering that issue now in a dispute between the FCC and Comcast, which argues the FCC doesn’t have explicit authority to enforce net-neutrality rules ....

    .... The Internet “plays an essential role in our democracy by allowing anyone with a computer connected to the Internet to publish their ideas, their thoughts, their opinions and reach a world-wide audience of hundreds of millions of people in seconds. This is free speech,” Franken said, before asking about a 2005 Supreme Court decision about deregulation of Internet lines ....

    .... That Supreme Court decision, Franken said, opened up a lot of concerns about net neutrality, and he asked Sotomayor if the American public “have a compelling First Amendment interest in ensuring…that the Internet stays open and accessible.”

    “Brand X was a question of which government agency would regulate those (Internet) providers,” Sotomayor replied. “The role of the court is never to make the policy, it’s to wait until Congress acts.”

    She tried to soften those remarks a bit, by talking about how the Internet affects many parts of society, including property rights and freedom of speech. “The children in my life virtually live on it now,” she said.

    It's a start.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Yellin, Jessica. "Franken handles Senate debut with a light touch". CNN. July 17, 2009. CNN.com. July 18, 2009. http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/17/franken.debut/


    Schatz, Amy. "Franken Out-Wonks New Colleagues on Net-Neutrality Question". Digits. July 16, 2009. WSJ.com. July 18, 2009. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07...ues-on-net-neutrality-question-for-sotomayor/
     
  10. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I thought Franken made a good showing for himself, and it is good to see the rule of law triumph. There for a while I thought the supremes would once again ignore the law to demostrate their Republican bias as they did in Florida. Fortunately in the Franken case they never got the opportunity.
     
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