Oh boy.
White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe embraced the Occupy Wall Street protests on behalf of President Barack Obama in an interview with Good Morning America on Tuesday.
“The protests you’re seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America,” Plouffe told George Stephanopoulos. “People are very frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don’t seem to play by the same set of rules. The question is, on Wall Street reform, which the president passed, for instance most of the Republicans in Congress and I believe all the Republicans on the stage tonight in New Hampshire, they want to unwind Wall Street reform.”
“If you’re concerned about Wall Street and our financial system, the president is standing on the side of consumers and the middle class and a lot of these Republicans are basically saying, you know what, let’s go back to the same policies that led us to the great recession in the first place,” he added.
Here we go!
Its members are tech-savvy youngsters who wear hooded sweatshirts, throw cool parties and play up their group’s name with pirate boats. But don’t let the cool facade fool you. They won 9 percent of the vote in Berlin’s parliamentary elections. That puts them well ahead of the laissez-faire Free Democratic Party, a long-established party and part of Angela Merkel’s established coalition.
The rise of the Pirate Party, which started in Sweden in 2006 and initially gained strength around The Pirate Bay’s legal troubles, is now a multi-country political empire. And when someone up-and-up on international affairs like Fareed Zakaria is fascinated in your story (over such boring things as Palestine formally submitting a UN bid), that’s good news. Folks like Zakaria give credence and credibility to the party’s work.
(via shortformblog)
Applause lines:
- The uninsured should be left to die.
- Said uninsured parents should have daughters who die unnecessarily of cervical cancer.
- A Fed Chairman who tries to fulfill his mandate by reducing unemployment is guilty of treason.
Boo lines:
- Muslims are not collectively responsible for 9/11.
- The children of illegal immigrants should not be denied the chance to go to college.
- We should not pass an extraordinarily regressive tax cut.
These are the same people who scream the loudest about the US being a “Christian Nation” and yet they must’ve been asleep that day in church “love thy neighbor” was covered. I’ll also bet they’ll all stick their fingers in their ears and start in with “lalala I’m not listening” if someone tried to tell them the “forgive our debts” part of the Lord’s Prayer was historically a literal forgiveness of debt.
From TalkingPointsMemo:
The agency has grand plans for future deep space exploration, and says it can even accelerate development of new, heavy-life spacecraft ahead of the early 2020s, but there’s a catch: It needs $65 billion, a nearly 80 percent increase over the current price tag, according to The Wall Street Journal, which has obtained a NASA budget analysis prepared for The White House.
Unsurprisingly, given the current fiscal climate, the White House isn’t especially keen about the idea.
Sigh.
More at the link.
