Another Bad Week For The Republicans/Democrats

Well this week was not good for the ditto heads and the right wing mobsters as they took the following torpedos:

- Unemployment Numbers Improved
- Montly job losses were the lowest yet
- Sotomayor was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice
- The right wing "grass root" protestors aka mobsters were revealed to be organized and sponsored by special interest groups (lobbyists) and not grass roots at all.
- Another nice week for the stock market and 401Ks

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Someone who repeats mindless slogans without giving thought to what they are saying.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Unemployment rises in 98% of cities
Metropolitan unemployment up in 363 of 369 regions in December. Some 40 cities report jobless rates higher than 10%.

By Mathew Katz

Economists were surprised by today's drop in the unemployment rate, which went from 9.5 percent in June to 9.4 percent in July. Close watchers of the labor market had expected to see the figure rise to 9.6 or 9.7. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters today that President Obama still expects to see unemployment hit 10 percent this year.

So why did the number go down in July? Part of the reason is that employers cut fewer jobs -- by 247,000, against an average of 331,000 for the last three months, including July.

Another, and perhaps larger part of the answer is that one key number factored into the rate fell unexpectedly. Unemployment is the number of people out of work as a percentage of the total labor force. The labor force in everyone who's employed or who wants a job. In July, that total labor force fell by 422,000.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/08/why_the_unemployment_rate_fell.html

 

No, there is a radio talk show host named Rush Limbaugh. His followers call themselves ditto heads. Typically when the call in to speak with limbaugh they begin by saying something like "dittos" or "mega dittos", hence the term dittohead.

The limbaugh show is well known for creating strawmen arguments and creating other misrespresentations, lies for the Republican Party. limbaugh has on occasion claimed to be the titular head of the Republican Party, but he has no official position in the Republican Party. He does however command a lot of power within the Republican Party. When a party official says something that offends limbaugh; the elected official always winds up issuing a public apology to limbaugh ususally within days or hours of the offense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_of_The_Rush_Limbaugh_Show

There are well known members of the Republican Party that are not ditto heads, few and far between, but there are a few...most notably Colin Powell, former Secretary of State in the george II administration. So not all Republicans are dittoheads. Dittoheads are limbaugh followers, devotees.

 

limbaugh has on occasion claimed to be the titular head of the Republican Party

too many letters in titular

 

Translation: All Republicans are mindless liars except the ones who are closet Democrats (most notably Colin Powell).

 

On the contrary, I think most of the Republican leadership know exactly what they are doing and are far from mindless...perhaps spineless, but definately not mindless.

The few that have had the guts to go against limbaugh (e.g. MIchael Steele, Chairman of the Republican Party, Representatives Grayson, Gingrey, et. al.) have been quickly brought back into line by limbaugh with the exception of Colin Powell.

 

Okay, so all Republicans are evil except for the ones who are really closet Democrats. Sounds like something that the right-wingers you are constantly bitching about would say about Democrats.

Pot, meet kettle.

 

A Rush Limbaugh radio show fan. Back in in the late 1980s or 1990s Rush Limbaugh's callers adopted the greeting "mega dittos Rush" which meant that "I agree with everything you have been saying Rush". This strange sounding pervasive use "mega dittos" phrase led to Rush's followers being called Dittoheads.

I don't know if Rush's fans or Rush's critics created the Dittohead term but Rush's fans seem comfortable referring to themselves as Dittoheads.

Dittohead might be partly inspired by the term Deadhead which refers to the fans of the band the Grateful Dead.

 

You're talking past joepistole, Acid Cowboy. He has already explained that all Republicans are not dittoheads, although dittoheads (and neocons, I would add) have been carrying the ball for the GOP for the last decade or so- and they have badly fumbled it, and run far "off sides", like Forrest Gump running the ball right out of the stadium.

 

His idea of a non-Dittohead seems to be liberal Republicans, like Powell and Michael Steele. This is like saying, "Not all Democrats are communist scumbags trying to destroy America. Just the liberal ones."

 

No the term came about because of a caller who said He loved the Show, not that He agreed with Rushs every though, the next caller said ditto to that point, that He loved the Show, not that He agreed lock step with Rush,

I love the show, but there are quite a few things that I don't agree with from Rush.

But here is the transcripe from the Show where Ditto and Mega Ditto came from;

The Limbaugh Lexicon: "Dittos"
July 26, 2007


Listen To It! WMP | RealPlayer

Audio clips available for Rush 24/7 members only -- Join Now!

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Todd in southern California, welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Thank you for taking my call, sir.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: I have a quick... Before I do my question, I have a quick question for you. I've listened to you for quite a while, very entertaining show --

RUSH: (Laughing.)

CALLER: -- and I keep hearing people calling and saying mega dittos. What does that referring to? I hope that's not a stupid question.

RUSH: Well, I'll be glad to answer it, but if you've been listening a long time, you certainly have heard me explain this. Have you just forgotten it?

CALLER: No. Believe it or not --

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: -- all the times I've listened, I've never heard that one explained.

RUSH: All right. Here's the explanation. Back when this show started August 1st, 1988, it took the nation by storm because there was nothing like it in the national media. The national media was all liberal. Here was this conservative program that reflected the views of millions of people. As people would call in, the first couple minutes of their call, literally, they'd spend thanking me and talking about how great it was to have something like this on the radio, finally, it was so great, and I of course loved hearing it. After awhile, after about six months, it finally just grew old. It was delaying getting to the discussion of the issues. A woman called from I think it was like New Hampshire, and after just one of those calls, said, "Ditto to what they guy just said." So ditto means, "I love the program. Don't ever go away." It doesn't mean, "I agree with you." It doesn't mean, "You're always right." It means, "I love the program." Mega dittos means, "I really love -- I, mean I adore -- this program. It's the only program!" That's what mega dittos means.

CALLER: Well, then let me be the first one to say mega dittos after hearing that today.

RUSH: All right. Thank you.

CALLER: I don't want to harp on the issue, but I think as talented as you are and experienced you are as and enlightened as you are, I think you're missing this one here with the dogs. (sigh) You know, we've been devaluing human life since the beginning of time. Hitler, Ghengis Khan, you can go back and back. So I think you've missed the point. Abortion didn't just devalue it from there. It's been devalued --

RUSH: Look, look --

CALLER: -- since the beginning of time.

RUSH: Don't compare average Americans to Adolf Hitler. Don't compare average Americans to Ghengis Khan -- or Gen-giss Khan as Kerry pronounces it. Don't. What I'm talking about here is average Americans. Look, this is not the only incident that makes me think that there has been a devaluation of human life. I know there has been. It's not arguable. This is, to me, something that's been going for decades now, and there are precise reasons for it, and you can see evidence all over the place for it, other than the outrage over the dog deaths at the Vick dogfight compound.

CALLER: Well, again, we've been numb for thousands of years to human suffering. Animals, only in the past hundred years have we started to really abuse them and misuse them and --

RUSH: Ohhhhhh!

CALLER: -- do things that... Think about it, Rush. Before --

RUSH: Todd, I have thought about it.

CALLER: -- we had to shoot them with bow and arrow, for our food source.

RUSH: I have thought about it, Todd. I have thought about it, and the point is, you're talking about the modern-day animal rights movement, which, by the way, quite a contrast, the animal rights movement and the pro-aborts. I don't want to go back to there, though. This is what I mean by, "People's historical perspective begins with the day of their birth." If you think cruelty to animals is something new and revolutionary and that there was this massive love and oneness and communal living between man and nature, you have got another thing coming. I will guarantee you, if the environmentalist wackos ever get their way and revert everybody's lifestyles back to the 1800s and the 1900s, the animal rights people will not put up with what we will have to do to animals in order to survive ourselves.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hi. Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, late arriving show prep continues to pour in here to the EIB Southern Command. Let's see.

RUSH: Cynthia in Kila, Montana. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. You're next. It's great to have you here with us.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. It's an honor to speak to you. I can't tell you.

RUSH: Thank you very, very, very much.

CALLER: But I was calling in regards to listening to Senator Schumer, and all I could think of was Hillary, and I could hear your parody in my mind, "I don't recall. I don't recall," and she couldn't remember anything.

RUSH: That was grand jury testimony, too.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Yeah.

RUSH: And may I tell you one other thing that the last caller reminded me of?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Yesterday at work, I work just part time, and I tell people all through the day what's going on in politics because I listen to you.

RUSH: Yes?

CALLER: Anyway, I had an old lady, sweet as could be. She started talking about all the deer that keep getting hit on the roads out here, and I said, "Well, they just paved our road out here in Kila and they have seen more dead deer on the road because people are driving like 50 in the 30-mile-an-hour zone."

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And she said, "Oh, they have just got to stop killing our wildlife," and I looked at her, and I went, "Yes, because I'd rather have it in my freezer than bloated on the side of the road."

RUSH: (Laughing.)

CALLER: Oh, my goodness. You should have seen her face.

RUSH: Good for you. What did she do?

CALLER: She just spurted. She had nothing to say.

RUSH: (Laughing.) By the way, that's great. Look, Cynthia, thanks very much for the call. The substitute broadcast engineer, Ed, working today, said that dog fighting, as far as historians have been able to document, had its origins in the Roman Empire. Now, the Roman Empire, for those of you in Rio Linda, is 2,000 BC up to AD. (I probably lost them there, too.) It was many, many years ago, and look what happened to them, folks. Look what happened to the Romans. They became The Sopranos. That was long after their empire fell apart.


END TRANSCRIPT

 

Joe is determined to see the economy in a positive light...simply because he likes Obama.

Behold...the blindness of extreme partisanship!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aX39_VW6pf3U

Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy may be just as sluggish during the next 20 years as Japan’s economy was in the last 20, according to Comstock Partners, a money manager founded and run by Charles Minter.

Stimulus programs and a surging money supply aren’t likely to “solve a problem of excess debt generation that resulted from greed and living way beyond our means,” the firm wrote yesterday in an unsigned report on its Web site. “We could wind up with a lost couple of decades.”

The CHART OF THE DAY shows U.S. total debt and gross domestic product since 1952, along with the ratio between them, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. The ratio rose in the first quarter to 372 percent even as household borrowing dropped for a second straight quarter, an unprecedented streak.

The U.S. is headed for “a deleveraging period” in which the amount of so-called private debt, including consumer borrowing, collapses as government borrowing explodes.

 

This is absolutly frightining and it seems to be playing out as we speak;

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

The Japanese stock market bubble burst in late 1989, followed soon after by the bursting of the real estate bubble in early 1991. Nearly 20 years later, stock and commercial real estate prices remain more than 70% below their peaks, while residential land prices are more than 40% below their peak.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Not all of them are mindless.

And Colin Powell is one of the liars - he has too much of a past to rehabilitate now.

The problem the Reps have now is that the alliance they forged with the Palin/Limbaugh crowd, the violent and ignorant and racist underbelly of the American electorate, involved purging the disloyal as well as attracting the complicit from the Jefferson Davis Dems. Starting around Reagan's ascension this purge has been successful (the Nixon era attempts were set back a bit) - we have seen even mildly disloyal Rep Congressmen in secure Rep districts facing nationally funded primary opponents, for example. The few even marginally reasonable political figures left have little power within the Party, and the rest are distributed along a range best characterized by the degree to which dishonesty or cupidity rather than ignorance or stupidity supports their public stances.

The Reps have no good principles, no good program, and no good people, left. They gutted their Party of all that. But they still have power they bought with that deal. It remains to be seen how much damage they can do, in their flailings - can they, as seems possible looking at the Dems and the other ostensible "opposition" to W&Co's agenda, so badly cripple the US federal setup that it cannot function as a government representative of the citizenry?

It's been playing out since the late 70s, when the authoritarian right recovered from its Nixon setback and solidified its grip on its chosen faction of the US electorate. People like you, Buffie. Thanks a lot.

btw: the class structure of the US economy is concealed in that first graph of Buffalo's - the household debt curve is rising in large part because the "real household income" and other averaged wealth numbers are dropping, not rising, for the majority of the population. The only substantial rise in wealth or income in the US since 1980 has been in the upper 20% class.

 

I guess my blindness to what is happening in our economy is why my stock market investments are up 50 percent thus far this year. I know you care little if I deny your accusation of using partisan goggles. But I will. I care about making money, about what is good for the economy...not about the politics. And as hard as that is for you to believe, it is the Dems and Obama that are moving the economy in the right direction. If the Republicans were in power, I would be heading for the hills and boarding things down preparing for chaos.

The Bloomberg article you cited has one critical problem, it assumes that things will be as they were when Japan exeperienced its meltdown. The crisis we are experiencing is nothing like what Japan experienced nor is the US governments response to the problem anything like that which the Japanese used. The Japanese government was slow to respond and tired numerous small fixes over a ten year period. In contrast we already have a economic stimulus in place and the major banks have already been recapitalized with rounds of new stock offerings. Two the Japanese economy was much more centralized that than found in the US making the losses more severe and the recovery much slower. So the basic assumptions used in the article are flawed.

That said, are we out of the darkness yet, no. But we are on the right track. And if you have been monitoring the economy these last several months you would have noticed signficiant improvment in virtually all the numbers. If you want to keep giving me your money go for it!!!! If you want to keep talking down the economy, go for it!!!

I am going to continue taking your money.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

If you own stock, SELL, SELL, SELL

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Who said all Republicans were evil? I never said that. The Republican extremists, the whackos who would shout out all views but their own are dangerous to the republic.

And I am suprised that you think the top dog in the Republican Party, the chairman of the party, Michale Steele is no a true blood Republican. And for that matter that you think Colin Powell a long time Republican is not a Republican.

 

The track is no different than the one followed by Bush...namely:

Sell more bonds to the Chinese, or have the Fed print money to buy them, while continuing to waste oceans of cash blowing people up in the middle east.

Encourage the throbbing masses to keep borrowing and spending...keep exporting American productive capacity to areas of world where people are willing to work for food. Lower interest rates to zero and re-inflate the phony bubble economy.

Its the same message you heard from Bush.

Are you really impressed by numbers fluffed up by changes in accounting rules, and government bailouts made with money printed out of thin air???

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090805/bs_nm/us_usa_housing_deutschebank

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The percentage of U.S. homeowners who owe more than their house is worth will nearly double to 48 percent in 2011 from 26 percent at the end of March, portending another blow to the housing market, Deutsche Bank said on Wednesday.

Home price declines will have their biggest impact on prime "conforming" loans that meet underwriting and size guidelines of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bank said in a report. Prime conforming loans make up two-thirds of mortgages, and are typically less risky because of stringent requirements.

"We project the next phase of the housing decline will have a far greater impact on prime borrowers," Deutsche analysts Karen Weaver and Ying Shen said in the report.

Of prime conforming loans, 41 percent will be "underwater" by the first quarter of 2011, up from 16 percent at the end of the first quarter 2009, it said. Forty-six percent of prime jumbo loans will be larger than their properties' value, up from 29 percent, it said.

"The impact of this is significant given that these markets have the largest share of the total mortgage market outstanding," the analysts said. Prime jumbo loans make up 13 percent of the total market.

Deutsche's dire assessment comes amid a bolt of evidence in recent months that point to stabilization in the U.S. housing market after three years of price drops. This week, the National Association of Realtors said pending home sales rose for a fifth straight month in June. A widely watched index released in July showed home prices in May rose for the first time since 2006.

Covering 100 U.S. metropolitan areas, Deutsche Bank in June forecast home prices would fall 14 percent through the first quarter of 2011, for a total drop of 41.7 percent.

The drop in home prices is fueling a vicious cycle of foreclosures as it eliminates homeowner equity and gives borrowers an incentive to walk away from their mortgages. The more severe the negative equity, the more likely are defaults, since many borrowers believe prices will not recover enough.