While the Family Leader pledge covers just about every other so-called virtue they can think of, the one that is conspicuously missing is tolerance. In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.
The Republican Party cannot afford to have a Presidential candidate who condones intolerance, bigotry and the denial of liberty to the citizens of this country. If we nominate such a candidate, we will never capture the White House in 2012. If candidates who sign this pledge somehow think they are scoring some points with some core constituency of the Republican Party, they are doing so at the peril of writing off the vast majority of Americans who want no part of this “pledge” and its offensive language.
GM’s problems over the last decade+ don’t seem to be going away, despite receiving the friendliest bankruptcy settlement in history.
Of course neither Obama nor Romney are going to let GM collapse, so the company doesn’t have much incentive to change. “Just keep building them,” I imagine them telling each other, “worst case scenario is we sell a few hundred thousand trucks to the feds.”
“Administration officials and Republican negotiators say the money can be taken from health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes without directly imposing new costs on needy beneficiaries or radically restructuring either program.”
So they finally agree on something and it’s a terrible idea. Great.
Agreeing to essentially bury the savings as far away from consumers as possible in the hopes that we won’t notice as things become more expensive is terrible policy. The disconnect between the cost of healthcare and the people consuming it is a serious problem, contributing a great deal to skyrocketing health care costs. But our government now sees fit to further exacerbate the problem in order to save themselves a political headache.
What’s more, we are still only talking about tens of billions a year. Meaning we are hovering around cutting 1-3% of our deficit, even if we include the new taxes Obama has been suggesting. So this is both bad policy and they aren’t even talking about real money. (A $1.2 trillion deficit is not meaningfully different than a $1.17 trillion deficit.)
“Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.”
This is horrible for a lot of reasons. The worst part, though, is that high profile instances like this cause the public to question the credibility of rape victims as people that are out to make a buck.
This is the exception. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, this is all they can seem to remember when they hear an accusation of rape.
-Ben
Creativity is limitless.
…just Not in Hollywood.
-Ben
The Chinese government, which just produced its first national audit of local finances, announced this week that local governments could owe as much as 30% of China’s GDP. That’s a good deal more than the government’s official debt load of less than 20% of GDP. And some analysts are putting China’s real debt levels at three to four times those levels.
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Roya Wolverson, reminding us that in global economy, everyone suffers together one way or the other. If it doesn’t seem that way right now that is only because some countries are better than others at faking it.
