Happy Birthday to Buck!
We at Pensito Review pause to wish our very own social media guru, Buck Banks, a very happy birthday today!
Day: December 9, 2010
Verbatim
I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged and The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself.
Aaron Sorkin, playwright and screenwriter, answering Palin’s Facebook update in which she challenged the legitimacy of critics of her killing and dismembering a caribou on her reality show. Sorkin added, “I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun…That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there’d be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully.”
Verbatim
It has become a widely-noticed habit of yours to concede or to adopt both the Republican terms of policymaking and Republican policies and programs … For many of your 2008 voters, this will indeed be the last straw for any active support they might have considered providing you.
— Ralph Nader, in a letter to President Obama, attacking his tax cut deal with Republicans.
Out with the Old Bush, In with the Old Bush
If you, like me, have been having a kind of deja-vu-all-over-again creepy feeling watching the Republicans swagger all over Capitol Hill in the wake of the midterm elections, it’s justified, according to Daniel Larison, writing (critically, actually) in The American Conservative:
One of the stories some conservatives told themselves in 2010 was that the Tea Party movement had succeeded in getting the Republican Party “out from under Bush.” Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now.
Larison goes on to elucidate the basic conundrum the GOP is getting itself into vis-a-vis the Tea Party — pander to that whack-job base to get the votes, then ignore the tea baggers’ concerns:
It is certainly true that the Tea Party movement opposes tax increases, but it is also supposed to be interested in bringing public debt under control. The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.
Seniors Take Note: House, Senate GOP Killed Payment to Replace Your Social Security Cost of Living Increase
How have Republicans used the “mandate” they received from the tea party and petulant swing voters last month? They have, as the president said, held the middle class hostage in order to extend the tax break for millionaires, despite the fact that the tax cut has not spurred job growth in the ten years it has been around, that it turned the Clinton surplus into deficits in the last decade, and that it will add another $700 billion to the deficit over the 10 years.
Meanwhile, while they have voted down bills that would benefit the middle class because they claim to be worried about, yeah, you guessed it, the deficit. On Friday, Republicans in the House voted against a tax break just for the middle class. Democrats were able to pass the bill in the House without Republican support, but Republicans killed it in the Senate. Yesterday, Republicans in both the Senate and the House voted down a payment to replace the Social Security COLA increase:
Kansas Hate Group Will Protest at Elizabeth Edwards’ Funeral in Raleigh on Saturday
Westboro Baptist Church, a group with a history of staging protests at funerals and issuing anti-gay statements, is planning to picket the Saturday funeral of Elizabeth Edwards.
The group said it will picket outside Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh from 12:15 until 1 p.m. when the funeral is scheduled to begin.
The group, based in Topeka, Kan., travels nationally to picket funerals.
The group came into the national spotlight when members picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a young man from Wyoming who was beaten to death by two men because of his homosexuality. Westboro has protested at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and well-known people such as Fred Rogers, Coretta Scott King and Jerry Falwell.
Lately, decent Americans have been peacefully counter-protesting this hate group by blocking their signs with large American flags. If you live in the Triangle area and you’re free on Saturday, the church is at 228 West Edenton Street downtown, a few blocks from the state capitol. Flags are optional.
