During the administration of President George W. Bush, Congress used reconciliation to enact three major tax cuts, each of which was predicted by the Congressional Budget Office to substantially increase federal deficits.[4] These tax cuts were set to lapse after 10 years to satisfy the Byrd Rule.

But to help increase the availability of Health Care to all, the Conservatives are against it.  That’s because Conservatives don’t actually care about anybody outside their immediate family, it seems.  Typical.  You never hear of Conservatives turning down the government run Medicare they receive, nor do you hear Conservatives denouncing Social Security and Medicaid or Medicare if it benefits themselves or their children.  It is only when it benefits “others”.  Conservatives offer no solutions to actually provide Health Care to everyone, just complaints that somehow they may not have as much money if everyone is given access to the same benefits in society.  Clearly, they haven’t been walking too many miles in another’s shoes.

When the Right forced their tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest (i.e. not percentage of rate cut, but actual affect on people’s lives in cut services and who got the money) and drove us into deficit spending again, they used reconciliation.  And it was clear at the time that they were forcing us into fiscal trouble:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that H.R. 1836 would decrease governmental receipts by $70 billion in 2001, by $512 billion over the 2001-2006 period, and by $1.26 trillion over the 2001-2011 period. In addition, the act would increase direct spending by $4 billion in 2001, by $40 billion over the 2001-2006 period, and by $92 billion over the 2001-2011 period. H.R. 1836 would reduce projected total surpluses by approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period. Of this total, $2.9 billion would be off-budget and not subject to pay-as-you-go procedures.

The caricatures were tucked into a 72-page Power Point presentation to GOP fundraisers in Boca Raton, Fla., last month in what was a direct call to use fear and reactionary sentiments toward Democrats as a fundraising strategy.

“What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate…?” one slide asks.

“Save the country from tending toward Socialism!” it replies.

The presentation encourages fundraisers to use a direct marketing pitch that exploits “extreme negative feelings toward existing administration.” It also describes ways to appeal to major donors, including “peer to peer pressure,” “access” and ‘”ego driven.”

The only surprise in all of this is that Fox News actually reported it.

But most on the Right don’t seem to care in the slightest that the GOP has no platform and that their agenda is set as opposition.  The GOP is a weak party.  Their values are weak.  Their tactics are dirty and weak.  Their followers are weak minded and unresearched.  And on top of it, the Right is more radical now than ever before.  How will it next reveal its ugly head?  Will it be by a modern day Tim McVeigh murdering children in the name of the Right or will it be an abortion doctor shot in Church, again, by a “Pro Life” radical?  The more radical the Right becomes, the less grounded they are in reality, the less nuance they find in the world, the more black and white things become, and the more dangerous their politics become.  But even if they do kill other people, they’ll find a way to blame Obama.

Weak hypocrites.  Dull, dim, herd.  Uneducated, ignorant.  All these words have become synonymous with 21st Century Conservativism.  Copy and paste Conservatism.  No need to do your own research when you can just find the opinions that best fit your political Faith and copy and paste the lies and spin they feed you.  Why think?  That’s too much trouble.  Better to save that brain power for watching American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, football, Fox News, and all the other mindless crap we’re bombarded with.  Nietzsche was right!  Most people are simply lazy.  This is exemplified by the Conservatives intellectual laziness.  We need more David Patreauses, not more Glann Becks and whats-her-names (you know, that rhetorician from Alaska), but you’d have to put down the TV remote and actually pick up a book that involves intellectual engagement to breed a new leader among the Conservatives of today.  That’s about as likely as a Conservative blogger independently researching before pasting the nonsense spewed out by the Right Wing machine.  Not likely.

Talk to a fresh can of soda and you’ll find that there is more thought, authenticity, and self-awareness in the bubbles as they burst than in 99% of the crap the Right says these days.

1. Fuzzy Mandates: The year was 2004.  George W. Bush had won the election– by actually getting more votes than the other guy this time– with 50.7% of the vote.  The Right was celebratory and the Left was aghast.  This was the highest percentage that a President had won by since W’s dad won in 1988.  Bush himself had received less than 48% of the vote in 2000 (Gore had slightly more than 48%).  When Bush won with less than 48% of the vote, he rammed deficit causing tax cuts through the Congress.  So what would he do with an actually majority of votes?  For that answer, see bush’s second term.  The important thing to note, however, is that following the 2004 election, moderation was not on his or his Conservative allies’ minds.  In fact, Bush said, “”I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now, I intend to spend it. It is my style.”  Well, that’s a reasonable argument, right?

Fast Forward to 2010.  Obama has now completed a year of fighting for Health Care reform with nothing but resistance from the Right.  Each time the Right puts out a plan, it falls apart under closer scrutiny, such as their Red Herring of Tort Reform.  But in all of this, the Conservatives had propagated the notion that  Obama is a radical and he wasn’t elected to change the policies of the country.  Or to quote one website: “he only won by 53%”.  Are you confused by the fuzziness of that argument?  Don’t be, it’s a political hack argument.  Obama got 52.9% of the vote in 2008.  That is higher than Bush ever got, but the Conservative don’t think that he has the same “political capital” that Bush had, which is why they have fought him every step of the way.

2. Fuzzy Filibusters: Democrats really need to pull their heads out of their rectums the next time they don’t control Congress.  Back when Bush’s party had control of both the White House and the Congress, they complained that removing the filibuster would go against the idea of checks and balances, but now that they have both, they want to get rid of it.  You can’t have it both ways!  And, yes, the GOP does the exact same thing when they have control versus when they do not, but one of you has to be the more mature party and we sure as hell know that the GOP thinks maturity is an “elitist” flaw.

3. Fuzzy Senate Appointments: Again, Democrats, you need to stick to a principled argument.  This hackery is why so many of us refuse to join a political party.  IN 2004 when you feared that the White House going to Kerry might mean that the GOP Governor, Mitt Romney, may be able to appoint a Republican to the Senate in his place, you changed the rule to prevent him from being able to do so.  Then when Ted Kennedy died– a man who, incidentally, was immediately vilified by the Conservative who danced on his grave– you changed the rule back because a Democrat was your governor.  Make up your freakin’ mind!  Don’t be such political hacks.  It’s fodder!  I don’t care what your “reasoning” was, it was completely illogical, save for power purposes.

4. Fuzzy Talk: This is actually referring to a couple– just a couple, though so many more could be addressed– statements by politicians that are actually completely logical and accurate, but which were publicly derided as stupid.  I am still amazed at how a majority of people will jump on these as illogical when in fact it is the opposite that is true.  I even used one of these quotes in a play, knowing full well that it would be misunderstood, but that it could be understood otherwise.

Quote 1: Donald Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld was mocked for this statement by the Left and yet the Left (such a useless sweeping generalization, just like when I say “the Right”) has seldom “unpacked” this statement.  Take some time to do so yourself, and you will discover that it is a very coherent statement that makes complete sense.  Also, check out the Wikipedia entry on “unknown unknown” and read the book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

Quote 2: Joe Biden:

John McCain’s making fun of the fact that I said paying taxes is patriotic. What I said was when a woman asked me, what do I tell people making over $250,000 a year that their taxes are going to go back to where they were with Reagan, which is a lot lower – lower than they were at Reagan, what do I tell them? I said tell them it’s time to be patriotic.

The problem with Biden’s quote is his lack of articulation.  What he is referring to are two different points in Reagan’s presidency.  If you look at the end of Reagan’s term in office, taxes were much lower than they were in the first half.  Reagan initially reduced the top bracket from 70% to 50% and then in 1986 it was lowered to 28%, which was higher than the next highest bracket, and he raised taxes on the lower class, hence why so many poor people thought he was an awful president.  Biden’s inarticulation brings into sharp focus the two terms of Reagan.  The first term was the 50% term and the second was the 28% term.  Of course Biden also misspeaks about this, because Obama never claimed he was going to bring the tax up to 50% for the top bracket.

And I tell you all of the above as context, but that is not what the Right (as a sweeping generalization) complained about.  It was the complaint that taxes might be a patriotic duty.  They are!  And paying higher taxes by the rich is also a patriotic duty.  Think about this.  If taxes are not a patriotic duty: if we have no taxes, there will be no military to defend the country.  I think the Right would agreed that we need a strong military and therefore we need to have taxes to cover the cost of the military, therefore taxes are inherently patriotic on these terms.  The problem that the Right actually has is not on whether or not taxes are patriotic, it is on what the money is used for.  If the money is used to provide health care for all, they think it is socialist and unpatriotic, but if it is used to build bombs and bail out corporations, then it is somehow patriotic.  So to mock Biden is a simpleminded response that plays on the rhetoric of the Right, but does not actually address the issue of patriotism and taxes.  I would go so far as to say that it is patriotic for the wealthiest to pay 50% in income tax, though I would not claim it to be inherently so.  Once we start to speak of specifics, we find the nuance.  Taxes are in and of themselves “patriotic” only in the sense of an on/off switch.  Once you get into the questions of how much and where the money goes, then there is much greater variations.  The Left and Right will not agree on what is patriotic about taxes, but pushed far enough both must agree on the patriotic nature of taxes if government is to exist and function in any way whatsoever.  Otherwise, we are referring to anarchy (lack of government) or a Communist like system in which the government doesn’t need to tax, because the government owns the businesses, etc. and thus receives capital from sales and the lot.

Quote 3: George W. Bush:

This is perhaps my favorite Bush quote, and one that I consider to actually be quite accurate, though the Left will cringe at having to accept the idea:

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it.

Governing in a dictatorship would always be easier, except for having to look behind you every five steps to make sure some other would-be dictator doesn’t have his knife out.

This is all I have time for at the moment– don’t even have time to proof read this post– but I think there will be another post on this subject and it will deal with the mathematic behind the “tax cuts increase revenues” claim.

President Obama, who has called for a “new generation” of nuclear power, offered $8.3  billion Tuesday in loan guarantees to help build the nation’s first commercial nuclear reactors in nearly three decades…

In his 2011 budget, Obama seeks to triple loan guarantees for nuclear plant construction, from $18.5 billion currently to $54.5 billion. This proposal, and his broader nuclear power push, has angered environmentalists and some Democratic backers.

Anyhow, here are the videos:

For those who don’t mind the elitism of mathematics, you’ll note that the unemployment rate under Bush (in the time frame above) jumped 58% from February 2008 to January 2009.  Under Obama, in the same amount of time, it jumped 20%.  In other words, under Obama the rate of unemployment increased at only 35% of the rate it was increasing under Bush.  Oops!  There’s that elitist mathematics again.  Damn logic!  It always get in the way of the rhetorical narrative of the Right recently.  Of course, Obama may well have had nothing to do with the drop in unemployment.  It may actually have been the Bush policies at the end of his term that turned it around, but in order for the Copy and Paste Conservatives to make that argument, they would have to first have it spoon fed to them by their biased news sources.  And then they’d have to admit that the policies of one president effect what happens under the president who immediately follows, including deficits, spending, redeployment dates, etc.

But Conservatives don’t need consistency, ’cause consistency’s an elitist flaw!