GOP Defector Spills the Beans

[SiriuslyLong]

DID YOU READ THE MIKE LOFGREN ARTICLE OF THIS THREAD?

Dont be downright silly. I quess your insults and attempts at discrediting me come from a purer place. lmfao. You seem to reach for those when you are on the losing end of arguments. Think Peter Schiff. (I couldnt resist that. You set yourself up for that with your unwillingness to be honest and acknowledge the many mistaken economic predicitons he has made)

We are not TOO FAR (lol) off on our philosophy of govt. Its just that I want a more effective govt not a weakened one; and I certainly dont think blaming Gov't for EVERY problem is a wise or accurate position. For whatever reason you seem to have a distorted view of my opinions.

When you answer basic questions posed to you about your postions you will gain more credibility.

LMFAO. If the shoe fits........

I will acknowledge Schiff's prediction as soon as you acknowledge his unrivaled prediction from 2006-2007. Again, just watch the first 1:15. My bet is that instead of acknowledging it, you have already posted something from Krugman in another thread. Thanks for that, but go ahead and just say that was incredible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

[Havakasha]

I've acknowledged on several ocassions (maybe more) that Laffer was wrong and Schiff was right in this instance.
I certainly wouldnt call it incredible or "unrivaled" (thats actually a lie.) That sounds like a guy (S&L for instance. lol) who is desperate to applaud one's
favorite economic theorist. There were actually quite a few people that were calling housing a bubble in those times.
Go back and look at the history. You know FACTS. lol.

Ok So now i am waiting for you to acknowledge just HOW MANY TIMES I PROVED that Schiff was wrong in his predictions. I have been waiting months now. Still waiting.....

If you cop out AGAIN I will simply be forced to embarass you again wilh all that i researched on Schiff. AAnd you know just how much i would hate to embarass you. Lmfao.

[SiriuslyLong]

Did you read the article? Its by Mike Lofgren. Its not propaganda. He is a Republican staffer for many years.
Where did you get that idea that the article was "propaganda" Very weird.

Mike Lofgren retired on June 17th AFTER 28 YEARS AS A REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL STAFFER.
He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate
Budget Committes.

When you answer my questions about Peter Schiff's predictions,
my questions on Climate Change, my questions
on the presidential campaign, and others, all of which i have asked you
mulitple times over the course of the past weeks I will
be happy to respond to any questions you post.

Posted 9/15/2011 9:33 PM, last edited 9/20/2011 12:02 AM.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. Good tactic I suppose.


LMFAO "your questions" - really, who the phuck do you think you are?

Yes, I read the article. It was interesting. Here's a democrat who turned republican. So what.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...my_values.html

Here is a guy who is a former liberal: http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/duffy50.html

Here is one from a former liberal who now claims to be a tea partier: http://redwhitebluenews.com/?p=15404

When you read these..................

[SiriuslyLong]

I've acknowledged on several ocassions (maybe more) that Laffer was wrong and Schiff was right in this instance.
I certainly wouldnt call it incredible or "unrivaled" (thats actually a lie.) That sounds like a guy (S&L for instance. lol) who is desperate to applaud one's
favorite economic theorist. There were actually quite a few people that were calling housing a bubble in those times.
Go back and look at the history. You know FACTS. lol.

Ok So now i am waiting for you to acknowledge just HOW MANY TIMES I PROVED that Schiff was wrong in his predictions. I have been waiting months now. Still waiting.....

Peter Schiff's "predictions" of hyperinflation, a tanking dollar and the dow at 5000 have not come true - yet, and I hope they don't. You have "proved" nothing. The point of bring attention to these possibilities is that they can be addressed, adn these outcomes are undeniably possible.

[Havakasha]

HE SAID THE DOW WOULD GO TO 1,400 (not 5,000) OR GOLD WOULD GO TO $12,000 IN THE
NEXT 2 TO 3 YEARS. OF COURSE HE WANTED TO GO INTO TO DEBT TO MAKE SURE HE WAS
RIGHT IN HIS BET. Irresponsible B.S.

You read it? Then why did you call it propaganda?
I quess you werent too impressed. Oh well. Back to the drawing board. lol

"who the phuck do you think you are"? Havakasha

Still waiting.....


When you answer my questions about Peter Schiff's predictions,
my questions on whether you think the planet is warming, cooling or if man has any involvement in climate change, my questions on what other Republcans besides Ron Paul you are thinking favorably about in the presidential campaign: my question about Krugman talking about the housing bubble even before Schiff, then maybe we can have an honest discussion. But you will duck and hide
and maybe even cry a little about "crusades".

[Havakasha]

Still waiting.....

[SiriuslyLong]

Then you are wasting your time. Post 14 addresses Schiff's "predictions".

I will steal one from your playbook. Still waiting on your comments on the first 1 minute and 15 seconds of the video. It won't take but a 1:15. Go ahead and listen to it and tell me what you think about those comments back in 2006 and 2007. Remember, today is September 20, 2011.

[Havakasha]

I KINDA knew " i was wasting my time." Its always embarassing to have to defend Peter
SChiff's many wrong predictions.

I watched the 1.15. Not saying much different than many people like Roubini, Krugman were saying. Though many Republicans like Greenspan etc DIDNT get it. Now tell me about the MANY predictions he got wrong including the ones for 2011.
Remember he called for 10 year bond interest rates to rise to 6 % in 2011, He called for a catastrophic collapse of the U.S. stock market in Jan. 2011, He called for Hyperinflation in the U.S. in 2011. He has also predicted that the Dow will be 1,200 in the next 3 (now closer to 2) years OR
gold will rise to $12,000. You see what i mean about him being the consumate doomsday predictor who will occasionally get it right?

How could someone who got it right in the 1:15 get it SO wrong in many of his other predctions.

STILL WAITING........

When you answer my questions about Peter Schiff's predictions,
my questions on whether you think the planet is warming, cooling or if man has any involvement in climate change, my questions on what other Republcans besides Ron Paul you are thinking favorably about in the presidential campaign: my question about Krugman talking about the housing bubble even before Schiff, then maybe we can have an honest discussion. But you will duck and hide
and maybe even cry a little about "crusades".

Oh boy still waiting....


I thought maybe you hadnt REALLY read the article of this thread. Lol

Here is the actual article by Mike Lofgren. It is rather long but very informative.

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all...ult/1314907779

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis


Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

[SiriuslyLong]

You read it? Then why did you call it propaganda?
I quess you werent too impressed. Oh well. Back to the drawing board. lol

"who the phuck do you think you are"? Havakasha

Still waiting.....


When you answer my questions about Peter Schiff's predictions,
my questions on whether you think the planet is warming, cooling or if man has any involvement in climate change, my questions on what other Republcans besides Ron Paul you are thinking favorably about in the presidential campaign: my question about Krugman talking about the housing bubble even before Schiff, then maybe we can have an honest discussion. But you will duck and hide
and maybe even cry a little about "crusades".

Better catch this before it changes.

Crying about your crusades. Are you kidding me? Really? Unbelievable. I find it shocking you are so zealous about your political beliefs, but do recognize that you are matched from the right. You are both on a crusade. Brooks was right. There is a battle between free enterprise and big government.

There is no "honest discussion" with someone so politically polarized.

You won't even consider anything skeptical about climate change. It is dogma to your political position. Skeptics are heretics. They are derided, chided........... In fact, there appears to be a whole segment of people who think it has become a religion. Here's a link: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=83024 In fact, here's the google search: http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...cular+religion You can have the climate change debate with others who are equally zealous skeptics. I'm not.

Yes, Krugman did also talk about the bubble, but no one got it more right, more poingantly than Schiff. It is right there in the video. You refuse to acknowledge it. Why?

[SiriuslyLong]

Posted 9/15/2011 9:33 PM, last edited 9/20/2011 12:02 AM.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. Good tactic I suppose.


LMFAO "your questions" - really, who the phuck do you think you are?

Yes, I read the article. It was interesting. Here's a democrat who turned republican. So what.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...my_values.html

Here is a guy who is a former liberal: http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/duffy50.html

Here is one from a former liberal who now claims to be a tea partier: http://redwhitebluenews.com/?p=15404

When you read these..................

Did you check any of these links? How about the formerly liberal gal who became a tea partier? C'mon, have a read. Oh that's right, it doesn't fit into your unwavering policital position lol.