It has been clever, but he did have to reach a couple of times. EG the previous day involved something about the stimulus not only creating jobs, but creating 3.3M of them. That would have been under a quarter of a million dollars per job, an absolute bargain compared to the reality.
There were districts in 2008 where more people voted for Obama than were registered to vote. His voter registration drives registered thousands of people named Mickey Mouse.
And it’s physically impossible for anyone to be prevented from voting by any of the GOP-enacted voter ID laws unless they’re ineligible to vote. You have to be a non-citizen, or be registered and have voted in another district – something, incidentally, that was done for Gore in 2000 by part-time Floridians in numbers two orders of magnitude higher than Bush’s margin of victory. That fraud didn’t turn that election is nothing more than a statistical accident.
You could argue that these laws aren’t the best way to solve voter fraud – God knows they won’t eliminate it. You could even argue suppression, if you could identify a scenario in which someone legally eligible to vote might be prevented from doing so by one of these laws – but nobody has described any such scenario.
But to claim that there is no fraud, or that it’s not a problem, is simply nonsensical. Too much of it happens in the wide open to even entertain the possibility that it doesn’t exist.
Bottom line, there is absolutely nothing wrong with demanding that people who aren’t citizens don’t vote, and that those who are citizens only vote once per election. And voter ID laws do exactly that and nothing more.
The issue isn’t that loans were made to an alternative energy company. That was a Bush program, after all. The issue is that the company that received the loans wasn’t a good candidate – the evidence revealed already show that to be the case, and show that the administration knew that ahead of time. Evidence also shows that a key investor in Solyndra – an individual who benefited financially from the loan guarantees – was a major Obama contributor.
So that’s what you have to do to get zinged for saying something stupid. Don’t say it!
Nobody seemed to find any humor in the left’s assertions that George W. Bush caused Hurricane Katrina, even though it was a charge that was leveled, in all seriousness, several times by his political opponents. To say nothing of those who blamed Bush’s policies as president for a recession that started prior to his election.
Obama has been blamed and criticized for lots and lots of things. But not for anything he did not do and for which he did not deserve criticism, and certainly not for anything as stupid as this.
In fact, about the only stupid claim I heard about the earthquake was that oil or gas drilling had caused it.
Keep allowing this administration to blame it’s failures on others, and they won’t change their behavior. If they don’t change their behavior, the problems that behavior has wrought will continue to grow.I know the strip seems stupid but harmless. But combined with the reaction of the broader press, while it may well be stupid, it is anything but harmless.Also, to point out the obvious that nevertheless seems to have escaped EVERYONE… S&P has appropriately taken an absolute beating for the role their ratings played in the financial crisis. What everyone seems to forget, however, is that those ratings were criticized for being excessively favorable – meaning that their critics wish they had been more critical of the products they were rating; and that those ratings were issued against mortgage-backed securities, which were being sold by the US government. So the recent downgrade of US debt, even if it were NOT warranted on the fundamentals (which, let’s face it, it is), would be S&P doing EXACTLY what it’s critics say it should have done with mortgage-backed securities – IE being more critical and not putting too much stock in the government’s backing of the debt.In other words, if you are a supporter of the administration and a critic of S&P, it is not helping your case to shine a light on S&P’s prior record of not being sufficiently critical of government-backed investments. They can’t be wrong at both ends.
@Harolynn - “once again - Obama is cutting Medicare - Ryan is killing it.”
Just a quick correction - this is the direct opposite of what is true. Ryan has put forth the (so far) only plan under which, ten years from now, Medicare exists in any form at all.
No one has suggested that the “pledge to America” represents anything particularly new or different from established GOP ideas. To the contrary, the policies that republicans will pursue when elected (if they know what’s good for them) are tried and true policies that have worked, to the benefit of all, every time they’ve been tried, without fail.
Now, these ideas might be considered “fresh” in that they are different than anything that’s been tried in at least the last decade or two, and are sharply different from what is going on right now, which is absolutely the novel and bold change with which we were threatened - er, that is, promised - if we elected Barack Obama.
In short, Republicans are not pledging to do something new and bold so you can get a better job, bigger house, or free health care. ALL that they are promising is that the government will STOP doing that which has caused your job to go away, your 401k to lose half it’s value, and the clock to start ticking on the lifetime of your access to health care. For almost everyone, that is all we ask for.
It has been clever, but he did have to reach a couple of times. EG the previous day involved something about the stimulus not only creating jobs, but creating 3.3M of them. That would have been under a quarter of a million dollars per job, an absolute bargain compared to the reality.