The Hate-GOP Machine

By L. Brent Bozell | Brent Bozell III – 7 hrs ago

..The latest polls show the people are not happy with President Obama's handling of budget matters, but Republicans look even worse. And yet, while the GOP delivers one idea after another, Obama has offered nothing, instead just attacking, attacking, attacking, blaming everyone but himself in utter denial of the reality that no man on the face of this Earth is more responsible for our debt catastrophe than he.

Why then is the public blaming Republicans more? It is because of the ceaseless, shameless and oftentimes utterly dishonest attacks on them coming from Obama's media hit men. A day doesn't go by without a leftist "news" media outrage. They come in all shapes, too.

First, there is the asinine. Think MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski. There she was broadsiding the Republicans for having refused Obama's proposal. "I think the Republicans look stupid and mean," she declared. "This is stupid. This is a no-brainer in terms of a deal. This is a no-brainer, and they look mean, and they look difficult, and they're going to lose this." But what is "this"? What was Obama's proposal? There was none, just nebulous language about the "wealthy" needing to pay their "fair share," of "revenue," which in the English language means a massive tax hike, which the GOP, correctly, rejects.

There is the inaccurate. MSNBC daytime anchor Thomas Roberts loudly complains that the party of the "super-rich" is to blame. "We haven't had tax increases over the last 10 years. We've had a recession; we've had two wars to fight. Why do you think the top 2 percent of America has a chokehold on the other 98 percent?"

That's almost exactly upside down. The Tax Foundation has estimated that the top 1 percent pays 38 percent of the entire income-tax burden, and the top 5 percent pays 58 percent. The bottom 50 percent pays nothing in federal tax. With these numbers, it could be argued that the bottom 50 percent has a chokehold on the top 5 percent.

There is the "I've lost all sense of sanity and class" crowd, and yes, we're talking Chris Matthews here. On "Hardball," Joan Walsh of Salon.com said the Republican resistance to new taxes is "deadly and it's wrong and it's hostage-taking, and you shouldn't negotiate with hostage-takers." Matthews had a chance to step in with a gentle, "Whoa, cowgirl." Instead it just carried him away, and he could only add: "I agree. It's terrorism!" A pundit who looks at the debt talks and sees deadly terrorism doesn't need a math class. He needs psychological help.

There is the obsequious. Obama is painted as the perfectly reasonable negotiator who has bent over backward. NBC's Matt Lauer wants to know, "Where is the shared sacrifice going to come from on the Republican side?" CBS's Bob Schieffer insists Obama talks compromise, but "I don't hear any concessions from people on the other side. They just say no taxes, and that's their negotiating posture."

No one, but no one in the media (outside of Fox News, of course) is calling this double-talking president of ours on the carpet. This president who now tells us we must raise taxes to save the Republic is the same president who just seven months ago was telling us that everyone agrees the worst thing one could do during a crisis is raise taxes. Republicans agreed then and hold to that position now. That makes them unreasonable, unbalanced.

And where did this sudden spurt of media fiscal discipline come from, anyway? Where were they when America needed someone to ask Obama, Pelosi and Reid how they were going to pay for TARP? Where were the media demanding to know where the trillion bucks for the anti-stimulus program was coming from? How about the trillion for Obamacare?

They went along for the ride on all these budget-busting disasters. And now they have the temerity to lecture us on fiscal discipline?

There is the oblivious. Some journalists refuse to acknowledge that spending has soared under Obama. When Grover Norquist factually noted Obama's binge, CNN anchor Ali Velshi erupted in protest. "Wait a minute! 'He created with his spending'? You didn't just suggest that our budget problem is because of President Obama, did you, Grover?" Norquist said yes, he wasn't kidding. Velshi dismissed this concept as unreasonable: "OK, we're going to pass by that question because that's an unreasonable position."

In round numbers: In fewer than four years, Obama has increased the debt by $4 trillion. He proposes we raise it another $2.3 trillion. This makes Obama responsible for almost half the debt of the United States. But it is "unreasonable" to say so.

The leftist news media aren't coming to this debate to be an honest broker. They're just trying to break one side apart, and never mind that it's their vision that is driving us right over a cliff.

http://news.yahoo.com/hate-gop-machine-070000918.html

"lefist new media"? All I ever hear about is how bad Fox News is lol.

"Obama has offered nothing". LOL

If anyone believes that they are way off in the fringe of the right wing.
We now comprehend how extreme Sirisly Long is in his views.

blican
EZRA KLEIN THINKS WE SHOULD LOOK AT HIS POLICIES, NOT HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff
Posted Apr 26, 2011 2:08 PM CDT

(NEWSER) – Don’t listen to Donald Trump. Barack Obama is not a Socialist Kenyan Muslim. The truth is far more startling: He’s a moderate Republican from the 1990s, writes Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Obama’s major policy ideas—mandate-based health care reform, cap-and-trade, and raising taxes to reduce the deficit—are all things that Republicans advocated back then, Klein observes. But now they’re running away from them, seemingly just to oppose Obama.

“The White House has shown a strong preference for policies with demonstrated Republican support,” Klein observes, “but that’s been obscured by the Republican Party adopting a stance of unified, occasionally hysterical, opposition (remember ‘death panels’?) … But as entertaining as reality-TV politics might be, it can’t be permitted to, ahem, trump reality itself.” The really interesting story here isn’t the origin of Obama—it’s the origin of his policies.
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Ezra Klein
Columnist
Obama revealed: A moderate Republican

By Ezra Klein, Published: April 25
America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early ’90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had signed one individual mandate bill or another.

The story on cap and trade — which conservatives now like to call “cap and tax” — is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was “more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past,” he said. The plan passed easily, with “aye” votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that “if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur . . . it’s something I would strongly support.”

As for the 1990 budget deal, Bush initially resisted tax increases, but eventually realized they were necessary to get the job done. “It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform,” he said. That deal, incidentally, was roughly half tax increases and half spending cuts. Obama’s budget has far fewer tax increases. And compared with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire in 2012, it actually includes a large tax cut.

The normal reason a party abandons its policy ideas is that those ideas fail in practice. But that’s not the case here. These initiatives were wildly successful. Gov. Mitt Romney passed an individual mandate in Massachusetts and drove its number of uninsured below 5 percent. The Clean Air Act of 1990 solved the sulfur-dioxide problem. The 1990 budget deal helped cut the deficit and set the stage for a remarkable run of growth.

Rather, it appears that as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals. As Gingrich’s quote suggests, cap and trade didn’t just have Republican support in the 1990s. John McCain included a cap-and-trade plan in his 2008 platform. The same goes for an individual mandate, which Grassley endorsed in June 2009 — mere months before he began calling the policy “unconstitutional.”

This White House has shown a strong preference for policies with demonstrated Republican support, but that’s been obscured by the Republican Party adopting a stance of unified, and occasionally hysterical, opposition (remember “death panels”?) — not to mention a flood of paranoia about the president’s “true” agenda and background. But as entertaining as the reality-TV version of politics might be, it can’t be permitted to, ahem, trump reality itself. If you want to obsess over origins in American politics, look at the president’s policies, not his birth certificate.

Most Americans would like to see a mix of spending cuts and tax increases be part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, a new poll finds, aligning the majority with President Barack Obama’s position.

Of those surveyed for a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday, 56 percent said they want to see a mix of approaches used in an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. The poll was conducted overnight Monday, as Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) voiced their views on the impasse in negotiations in back-to-back televised primetime speeches.

“It does seem to be that the popular narrative is falling on the side of the president on this one,” Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said.

Just 19 percent of Americans said they favor a plan like Boehner’s, which would rely solely on spending cuts to existing programs to reduce the deficit. Twelve percent said they would prefer a plan to reduce the deficit only by raising taxes.

Americans’ blame for the impasse is spread all around, though is particularly strong against congressional Republicans, with 31 percent of those surveyed saying they are responsible for it. Twenty-one percent blamed Obama and nine percent blamed congressional Democrats.

Eighty-three percent of those surveyed said they were concerned about the failure of the negotiations thus far, including 54 percent who said they were very concerned.

The poll surveyed 600 people, including 512 registered voters, on Monday night. The error margin is plus or minus four percent.

Extreme? You're funny.

You're a card carrying liberal democrat who opposes any ideas other than your agenda. That's extreme. I posted an article that I found totally amusing after reading dozens of posts about the dangers of Fox News when apparently Fox News is just ONE of many political news outlets. To you, MSNBC is good, right, just and Fox News is bad, wrong and unjust - that's extreme.

I took another typology test yesterday. I'm so in the middle it makes wonder if I have an opinion. If I am "extreme" because I don't want to pay any more in taxes, then I suppose I'm extreme, and from a recent post, I will be paying more thanks to Obamacare. The course of my tax future is already going in the wrong direction, and now people like you want to accelerate it.

Maybe I should get a tax accountant?? Do you think that would be a good idea??

Obama has proposed a plan from the center which is supported by a majority of people. Not extreme at all.

Most Americans would like to see a mix of spending cuts and tax increases be part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, a new poll finds, aligning the majority with President Barack Obama’s position.

Of those surveyed for a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday, 56 percent said they want to see a mix of approaches used in an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. The poll was conducted overnight Monday, as Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) voiced their views on the impasse in negotiations in back-to-back televised primetime speeches.

“It does seem to be that the popular narrative is falling on the side of the president on this one,” Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said.

Just 19 percent of Americans said they favor a plan like Boehner’s, which would rely solely on spending cuts to existing programs to reduce the deficit. Twelve percent said they would prefer a plan to reduce the deficit only by raising taxes.

Americans’ blame for the impasse is spread all around, though is particularly strong against congressional Republicans, with 31 percent of those surveyed saying they are responsible for it. Twenty-one percent blamed Obama and nine percent blamed congressional Democrats.

Eighty-three percent of those surveyed said they were concerned about the failure of the negotiations thus far, including 54 percent who said they were very concerned.

The poll surveyed 600 people, including 512 registered voters, on Monday night. The error margin is plus or minus four percent.