Piers Morgan has been surprisingly good the last two nights in the after conference interviews.
US Presidential Election: Tuesday November 6th, 2012
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Who's he talking to tonight? Yesterday it was the Castro brothers...Bill Richardson and a few others.
Fact check after the break on CNN. I know Clinton was economical with the truth in a couple of places but I don't think he was anywhere near pants of fire.
PolitiFact are saying he's not only right about Job creation, but actually modest, as population growth expanded more under Republicans than Dems.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...linton-says-democratic-presidents-top-republ/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...linton-says-democratic-presidents-top-republ/
Interesting thing with those numbers is Jimmy Carter. He is demonized in the US but he created 9 million jobs in ONE term
Republicans
Richard Nixon: Increase of 7.1 million jobs
Gerald Ford: Increase of 1.3 million jobs
Ronald Reagan: Increase of 14.7 million jobs
George H.W. Bush: Increase of 1.5 million jobs
George W. Bush: Decline of 646,000 jobs
Total: Increase of 23.9 million jobs under Republican presidents
Democrats
John F. Kennedy: Increase of 2.7 million jobs
Lyndon B. Johnson: Increase of 9.5 million jobs
Jimmy Carter: Increase of 9.0 million jobs
Bill Clinton: Increase of 20.8 million jobs
Barack Obama: Increase of 332,000 jobs
Total: Increase of 42.3 million jobs.
This story should grow....
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169757/exclusive-paul-ryan-quietly-requested-obamacare-cash
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169757/exclusive-paul-ryan-quietly-requested-obamacare-cash
So, have the republicans even tried to explain why replacing a 'secret-Muslim' with a Mormon is supposed to make the Christian God pleased? Is it the lesser of two evils, Mormon is considered closer to Evangelical Christianity than Muslim?
Well the answer has to do with one of them being a black guy named Barack and the other one being a white guy named Willard.
Clinton is hands down the best president since FDR, the man redefined the political landscape and if it wasn't for term limits America would be in a much better place today. Top speech by an amazing individual.
Two words "magic underwear"
Great speech by Clinton.
I almost believed every word he said.
Clinton is by far the best Us politician for decades (except for Reagan?).
I'm a fiscal conservative, and I could see myself voting for Bill....
I'm a fiscal conservative, and I could see myself voting for Bill....
Truman was a great president, read his biography, his speeches are spot on, even for today's world they are still very actual. He tried several times to pass a universal heath care law.
Reagan?! I don't understand why he's so revered. The man was a war criminal who's deregulation policies kickstarted the deterioration of the economy, felt even today.
"Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall".....
Seriously...because he deregulated EVERYTHING(sure lets ignore how that might have played a hand in what's transpired over the last few years...) But he deregulated!
Fact is, if you showed republicans cold hard facts in terms of what Reagen did with taxes(increases) + federal programs, they'd say he was a Democrat.
He's revered because he made conservatives feel good about themselves. The rich felt virtuous simply for being rich, the cultural conservatives felt validated in their vision of Americanness.
That's all conservatives really want. The rest of it - balanced budgets, trickle-down economics sustaining the American Dream, a warrior leader single-handedly defeating communism - can just be invented.
Reagan didn't create as many jobs per year as Carter and he increased spending and debt faster than any other President.
the best speech this election cycle. Obama has to be darn good to top that.
Clinton was talking directly to those blue color voters Willard is desperate for.
Clinton was talking directly to those blue color voters Willard is desperate for.
Yeah I've never really got the uber Reagan love, but then he was before my time. And with the deification of Kennedy and the panto villan portrayal of Nixon undercutting much of the popular perception in the last 50 years they were probably desperate to find someone who didn't make them seem like the bad guys*
*they are the bad guys
*they are the bad guys
They've only had one non-bad guy since Eisenhower. Though there's an argument that Bush 41 was more sinister than actually evil.
Yeah apart from running a criminal conspiracy from the Oval Office, he was Abraham fecking Lincoln...
BTW for those like me who don't know much about Watergate, the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein's been doing a really good series of blog posts in 'real time', as it were - telling the story day by day as it developed.
Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton have both given absolutely fantastic speeches. If the Dems go 3/3 with Obama tonight, hard not to see them getting a nice bounce.
Except that no-one's watching who hasn't already made up their mind
I wouldn't go that far. He ended the Vietnam War, established relations with China, took the country off the gold standard...
Except for the 4 percent undecideds.
Does Pletch still think the race will be close between Obama and Romney?
It's made enough of a news cycle for many undecideds to see it. I mean, we're not voting, but we've still watched it. Some of us at 5 in the fecking morning. The main bits will probably get a fair deal of airplay and column inches.
Unless you just watch wall to wall Fox, it'll be pretty hard to at least be partially aware that Mich & Slick Willy gave great speeches, whilst Clint talked bollocks to an empty chair.
Yes, and he's armed with loads of links to Nate Silver, Ezra Klein and
probably Glenn Greenwald
to prove his point.
Provocative read from the actor who would say anything, John Cusack
I don't think there's any doubt it's going to be close. Given the amount of media coverage that the Republicans have had, I don't see much reason to adjust a big bounce into the current polls.
Obviously a lot can happen between now and the polls but if I had to call it now, I'd go
Romney - All the obvious states (191) + NC (15), Florida (29) + one of Colorado (9) or Wisconsin (10). So a total of 244-245.
Obama 293-294.
How fecking important is Ohio? What makes me uneasy is the latest Gravis Marketing poll from there. It swung from +0.9 Obama to +3.1 Romney in a week. If that goes, it's 275-263. Too close for comfort. Hope Romney got a larger than national swing there.
Obviously a lot can happen between now and the polls but if I had to call it now, I'd go
Romney - All the obvious states (191) + NC (15), Florida (29) + one of Colorado (9) or Wisconsin (10). So a total of 244-245.
Obama 293-294.
How fecking important is Ohio? What makes me uneasy is the latest Gravis Marketing poll from there. It swung from +0.9 Obama to +3.1 Romney in a week. If that goes, it's 275-263. Too close for comfort. Hope Romney got a larger than national swing there.
Some valid points in there.
Apparently the Republicans don't think Clinton gave a very good speech. Not one of his best, it seems.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if the roles were reversed and some Republican had given a great speach, honestly a good number of Democrats would say it was not that good. No shock really.
Thankfully none of them did.
Silver's new projections show Obama beginning to run away after the RNC's modest bounce.
Nice post from Jon Chait on why the GOP are doing to Obama exactly what they did to Clinton, using the same demonstrably false arguments.
Bill Clinton’s Forgotten Class War
By Jonathan Chait
In an otherwise factual and persuasive speech, Bill Clinton made one argument so astonishingly brass I half-expected the crowd to laugh him out of the hall. It came when Clinton cited his own presidency as a bygone era of partisan cooperation, when he couldn’t hate the Republican Party, and the two sides would come together for the good of the country. This nostalgic riff went down like a charm, not only with the partisan crowd but with the blown-away commentariat afterward. Did none of them remember the Clinton presidency? Where the mainstream Republicans accused him daily of socialism and the conservative ones accused him of being a murderer? The apocalyptic government shutdown fights? Impeachment?
And then it occurred to me that Clinton’s fairy tale went down so smoothly not just because of the soothing passage of time but also because nobody has an interest in reminding America of the blinding derangement that defined the Clinton-era GOP. Clinton doesn’t, as he enjoys his post-presidential role as beloved elder statesman. Republicans don’t, because they want to portray Obama as uniquely radical, and their Spartans-at-Thermopylae stand against him as a justifiable reaction to an unprecedented threat, not just the recurrent partisan hysteria that overtakes them during any Democratic presidency. And Obama doesn’t, because he wants to cast Republican opposition of his agenda as unprecedented.
But the truth is that the Clinton-era Republicans believed, just as the Obama-era version of their successors, that the president was a wealth-confiscating Marxist. (The role of Chicago/Kenya, as the incubator of the president’s secret radical agenda, was the sixties–Yale–Hillary Clinton.) And this forgotten past actually lends us crucial insight into the economic debate occurring at this very moment.
Clinton’s first year was consumed by a massive conflagration over his plan to reduce the deficit. The contours of the fight were nearly identical. Democrats accepted the need to reduce federal spending, but demanded an upper-income tax hike, so that the middle class would not bear the whole burden of reducing a deficit that had originally been created in large part through regressive tax cuts. The tax demand rendered the plan radioactive to the GOP. Zero Republicans supported Clinton’s deficit reduction plan.
I’ve written many times about the wildly fearful invective that characterized the opposition. Republican dogma held as an absolute truth that raising tax rates on the rich must, by reducing the work incentive, slow the economy and thereby fail to raise the projected new revenue. Even the most respected Republican-affiliated economists, like Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, insisted “there is no possibility that the Clinton plan will produce the deficit reduction that it projects.”
Ground zero of opposition was the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which fashioned a running graphic for its crusade against Clinton’s plan, entitled “The Class Warfare Economy,” decorated with an illustration of a guillotine. The day Clinton’s plan passed the House of Representatives in a dramatic vote, the Journal editorialized, “We are seeing the early signs of the stagflation that we knew so well during the Carter presidency.”
The current parties are currently engaged in a stalemate over similar fault lines. The Republicans may have a more radical counter-proposal now, but the Democratic position is similar — okay, we’ll cut spending, but only if it comes along with a tax hike on the rich. Republicans have again decried this as class warfare and a destructive assault upon the bedrock of the economy.
Obama has argued, persuasively, that the record of the last two administrations blows up the conservative economic position on taxes. Republicans insisted Clinton’s tax hike on the rich would crush the recovery and lead to lower tax revenue, when the opposite happened. Then they took power and cut taxes, arguing that it would spur growth and produce higher-than-expected revenue, only to result in a historically anemic recovery. As Obama has said:
Romney, naturally, seized upon the last line (“we tried our plan and it worked”) to cut an ad inaccurately suggesting that Obama was boasting that his own plan worked — i.e., Mission Accomplished, Obama thinks the economy is wonderful. Obviously Obama was claiming that the plan he proposes to implement was tried in the nineties and worked.
Other conservatives have tried a more subtle response. National Review editorializes that, since other factors help produce the economic growth of the nineties, higher taxes on the rich don’t automatically guarantee faster growth. The Wall Street Journal editorial page attempts a more audacious historical rewrite, insisting that the nineties boom was really driven by things like spending restraint. Both these revisionist efforts obscure how badly wrong they were at the time of the Clinton tax hike. Conservatives didn’t argue that higher taxes on the rich were sort of a bad idea, but might work out anyway if we hold spending down. They argued that higher taxes on the rich would absolutely, necessarily fail.
And their current line implies that higher taxes on the rich, in conjunction with spending restraint, is perfectly compatible with fast economic growth. Which it is! The obvious lesson of the Clinton and Bush years is that the difference in incentive effects of tax rates between the low thirties and forty percent is negligible at best. Conservatives may think it’s unfair to raise taxes on the rich, but the economic arguments against doing so have been pretty well refuted.
Americans still remember the outcome of the Clinton administration, but they don’t remember the policy fights that occurred at the time. The Republicans' current line rests upon a historical revisionism so blatant they are holding up Clinton himself as an ideological ally, a fellow moderate, in opposition to Obama’s radical class warfare. It’s important to remember that Republicans made the same hysterical accusation against Clinton, even if Clinton himself has no interest in reminding us.
By Jonathan Chait
In an otherwise factual and persuasive speech, Bill Clinton made one argument so astonishingly brass I half-expected the crowd to laugh him out of the hall. It came when Clinton cited his own presidency as a bygone era of partisan cooperation, when he couldn’t hate the Republican Party, and the two sides would come together for the good of the country. This nostalgic riff went down like a charm, not only with the partisan crowd but with the blown-away commentariat afterward. Did none of them remember the Clinton presidency? Where the mainstream Republicans accused him daily of socialism and the conservative ones accused him of being a murderer? The apocalyptic government shutdown fights? Impeachment?
And then it occurred to me that Clinton’s fairy tale went down so smoothly not just because of the soothing passage of time but also because nobody has an interest in reminding America of the blinding derangement that defined the Clinton-era GOP. Clinton doesn’t, as he enjoys his post-presidential role as beloved elder statesman. Republicans don’t, because they want to portray Obama as uniquely radical, and their Spartans-at-Thermopylae stand against him as a justifiable reaction to an unprecedented threat, not just the recurrent partisan hysteria that overtakes them during any Democratic presidency. And Obama doesn’t, because he wants to cast Republican opposition of his agenda as unprecedented.
But the truth is that the Clinton-era Republicans believed, just as the Obama-era version of their successors, that the president was a wealth-confiscating Marxist. (The role of Chicago/Kenya, as the incubator of the president’s secret radical agenda, was the sixties–Yale–Hillary Clinton.) And this forgotten past actually lends us crucial insight into the economic debate occurring at this very moment.
Clinton’s first year was consumed by a massive conflagration over his plan to reduce the deficit. The contours of the fight were nearly identical. Democrats accepted the need to reduce federal spending, but demanded an upper-income tax hike, so that the middle class would not bear the whole burden of reducing a deficit that had originally been created in large part through regressive tax cuts. The tax demand rendered the plan radioactive to the GOP. Zero Republicans supported Clinton’s deficit reduction plan.
I’ve written many times about the wildly fearful invective that characterized the opposition. Republican dogma held as an absolute truth that raising tax rates on the rich must, by reducing the work incentive, slow the economy and thereby fail to raise the projected new revenue. Even the most respected Republican-affiliated economists, like Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, insisted “there is no possibility that the Clinton plan will produce the deficit reduction that it projects.”
Ground zero of opposition was the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which fashioned a running graphic for its crusade against Clinton’s plan, entitled “The Class Warfare Economy,” decorated with an illustration of a guillotine. The day Clinton’s plan passed the House of Representatives in a dramatic vote, the Journal editorialized, “We are seeing the early signs of the stagflation that we knew so well during the Carter presidency.”
The current parties are currently engaged in a stalemate over similar fault lines. The Republicans may have a more radical counter-proposal now, but the Democratic position is similar — okay, we’ll cut spending, but only if it comes along with a tax hike on the rich. Republicans have again decried this as class warfare and a destructive assault upon the bedrock of the economy.
Obama has argued, persuasively, that the record of the last two administrations blows up the conservative economic position on taxes. Republicans insisted Clinton’s tax hike on the rich would crush the recovery and lead to lower tax revenue, when the opposite happened. Then they took power and cut taxes, arguing that it would spur growth and produce higher-than-expected revenue, only to result in a historically anemic recovery. As Obama has said:
I’m also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well. Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan — and it worked.
Romney, naturally, seized upon the last line (“we tried our plan and it worked”) to cut an ad inaccurately suggesting that Obama was boasting that his own plan worked — i.e., Mission Accomplished, Obama thinks the economy is wonderful. Obviously Obama was claiming that the plan he proposes to implement was tried in the nineties and worked.
Other conservatives have tried a more subtle response. National Review editorializes that, since other factors help produce the economic growth of the nineties, higher taxes on the rich don’t automatically guarantee faster growth. The Wall Street Journal editorial page attempts a more audacious historical rewrite, insisting that the nineties boom was really driven by things like spending restraint. Both these revisionist efforts obscure how badly wrong they were at the time of the Clinton tax hike. Conservatives didn’t argue that higher taxes on the rich were sort of a bad idea, but might work out anyway if we hold spending down. They argued that higher taxes on the rich would absolutely, necessarily fail.
And their current line implies that higher taxes on the rich, in conjunction with spending restraint, is perfectly compatible with fast economic growth. Which it is! The obvious lesson of the Clinton and Bush years is that the difference in incentive effects of tax rates between the low thirties and forty percent is negligible at best. Conservatives may think it’s unfair to raise taxes on the rich, but the economic arguments against doing so have been pretty well refuted.
Americans still remember the outcome of the Clinton administration, but they don’t remember the policy fights that occurred at the time. The Republicans' current line rests upon a historical revisionism so blatant they are holding up Clinton himself as an ideological ally, a fellow moderate, in opposition to Obama’s radical class warfare. It’s important to remember that Republicans made the same hysterical accusation against Clinton, even if Clinton himself has no interest in reminding us.
It'll be back to normal in a week, unless the jobs report on Friday is good.
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