David Broder says the stimulus package must have “the best thinking that’s available in both parties”.
I wonder if this is the kind of thing he’s talking about:
You’d think Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes would be up by now. But , no, after a stint as a correspondent in Israel, he took his act to Capitol Hill today.
“I don’t believe there’s two sides to every story. It’s black and white,” Wurzelbacher explained. “There’s right and wrong.”
One thing that needs to be done, he said, is killing this stimulus package, because it’s just another example of “American government” — Republicans and Democrats — “kicking our butts left and right.” He also called it welfare.
Keith
How much longer before JTP is just speaking in grunts?
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
As stupid as that is, it’s less stupid than yesterday’s David Brooks column, and better than most anything Bill Kristol ever wrote. Maybe JTP does indeed have a future as a pundit.
DougJ
@Monty
The weird joke about Nordic track was what got me about that article.
Lola
Didn’t JTP have tax problems himself? If Daschle is disqualified so is JTP.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
When will the Dems start acting like the majority party they are?
Never you say? I’m shocked, shocked to realize that.
Media Browski
And republican friends in our office don’t get why I’m pissed at them this week . . . it’s like they all have decided to selectively unlearn the lessons of the Great Depression/Econ 101/The Past 8 Years all in order to score partisan points while the nation’s economy and infrastructure crumble.
Hunter Gathers
When was the last time this moron actually performed any ‘plumbing’. I guess it’s been a while, since he now collects GOP ‘welfare’ now. What a tool.
headpan
Schmoe the Plumber (when asked about a political career – mother of god, repubes are f**ked): “I don’t know if the American public deserve me,”
In 2000 and 2004, I would have said "yes"
Dungheap
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon):
I hear there’s an opening on the NY Times op-ed page.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@DougJ: I’m not sure when I’ve ever been so gobsmacked as I was after reading that. But…. but, the NYT did issue a correction this morning:
Feel better now?
Media Browski
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: The second that [expletives deleted, for the children] like Landrieu quit undermining us.
I hope everyone gets why Lieberman was courted by Obama now: we can’t trust our own rat-[more expletives deleted, we’re in a bad mood this morning] members to support simple things like infrastructure and public transport in a [dirty dirty expletives deleted] stimulus bill.
sarah
Joe The Plumber is the Paris Hilton of politics. He only has as much influence as the media and GOP lets him have. Which, unfortunately, is a lot.
@Montysano If I didn’t know Brooks better I’d think he was trying to be snark-ily ironic. But instead his buffoonery just makes my head hurt.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Media Browski:Listening to local wingnut radio on the drive home last night, the host was ranting that BO’s plan to limit executive compensation for TARP participants was "communism, pure and simple", that we need to get our fucking hands off of the Market and let the Invisible Hand work its magic.
I wish I was kidding.
low-tech cyclist
Did you say "All Hail Marx-Lennon"?
Herb
My Republican uncle, who just declared bankruptcy, and my Republican dad, who foreclosed on his house last year, are both against the stimulus plan. Mostly because of their devotion to financial discipline.
Media Browski
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon): that’s amazingly right and wrong. We do have state ownership of these banks now BECAUSE of a misplaced belief that the Invisible Hand would fix things (generations of economists shake their heads at this bizarrely religious belief in a system that we merely claim will *tend* towards equilibrium, as long as there aren’t any market failures).
And guess what, when you accept state funds and ownership because you rat-[I’m on a roll!]ed your own business, you get some austerity with it.
[!!]
Skepticat
“I don’t believe there’s two sides to every story. It’s black and white,” Wurzelbacher explained. “There’s right and wrong.”
Apparently he can’t count either.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@low-tech cyclist:
I did indeed, although "Everything You Know Is Wrong", which tragically appears to be out of print, is my favorite.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
I still don’t get it.
They lost. Elections have consequences. Sure, I understand Obama trying to play politics with this longer term ("I’ve reached out, blah blah blah") but the people in the House and Senate don’t have to play by those rules.
Spineless wimps, one and all. These people play not to fail, they don’t play to win.
headpan
Media Browski
Fixed
headpan
why doesn’t strikeout function work once the comment is submitted?
Napoleon
I hope the Rep acting like children finally move the Dems to do away with filibusters. At the very least they have to force the Republicans to actually filibuster.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Media Browski: Allen Greenspan testified to Congress, back in the fall, and said that one of his most deeply held beliefs had been proven wrong: that financial institutions, left unregulated, would do the right thing because…… it’s the right thing to do.
That’s when I knew we were fucked.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@headpan:
I’ve found that if you manually key in strike and /strike, it seems to work.
headpan
Hell yeah, like leaving your car running, doors open, with the keys in the ignition and trusting that nobody would steal it because "stealing is teh wrong" and we don’t need cops.
headpan
thx, Montysano
Media Browski
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon): Yeah, I know. [more expletives].
Ayn Rand and economics do not mix I’ve found. In fact, about the only thing that mixes with Ayn Rand is stoned late-night bull sessions among freshmen who are really just trying to sort out who’s going to bed with whom.
Adrienne
@Skepticat: I SWEAR I thought the same damn thing when I read it!
@Lola:
This guy is an idiot of a higher order and as a devoted Progressive, I am more than willing to accept him as a spokesperson for the Rethugs. Him and Sarah Palin. And Rush.
They are the three-headed Cerberus preventing Republicans from escaping electoral Hades. I, for one, applaud and encourage their efforts.
4tehlulz
So black is right and white is wrong. Self-hating motherfucker.
TheHatOnMyCat
"Both sides now" sounds better to me than the daily dose of what the stupidest and most irrelevant people out there are saying.
What, no Malkin quotes today?
We really don’t know life, at all.
Left Coast Tom
I take it nobody asked Sam The Clerk when he’s going to get off wingnut welfare and learn a trade? He could, for example, get a plumber’s license.
4tehlulz
@Adrienne: Chrysler is preventing Republicans from escaping Hades? Maybe it is worth saving after all.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Adrienne:
Happy to help.
p.a.
I want to see JtP on a panel discussion at AEI or Heritage with the other fake economists to see the looks on their faces. Really, if someone wrote a script with this stuff for a ‘Wag the Dog’-type movie, they’d be laughed out of the room.
I’ve always given national Republicans credit for motivating (usually through fear) the um, lesser lights among voters. It seems teh stoopid has ‘osmosed’ up the ladder.
Josh Hueco
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon):
Or that embracing a foolish economic philosophy because the skag who invented it was good in the sack? Also a really bad idea.
SpotWeld
Considering all the crap he causes to float up… I’m starting to mentally re-name him "Joe the Turd-Stirrer"
Napoleon
I would love to see a pollster run a poll of what the public thinks of the whole JTP shtick. I suspect it would be a negative, maybe a pretty big negative. I was surprised in the last week or so when there were links to a poll that included Rush that there had been very little public polling on him, but what was done shows how little the public thinks of him.
ksmiami
I say fuck the Republicans sideways, backwards and upside down hanging from a swing. Just do it with a smile on your face and a pleasant demeanor. These people are psychopaths with no respect for fair governance, the Constitution, or even smart policies.
The message should be simply this:
Republicans want America to fail – Do you want that too???
HIT THESE FUCKERS HARD AND OFTEN
Ward 3 Denizen
JTP is awesome. We all joke about getting some of that wingnut welfare, but he actually went out and did it. How many of us could have figured out a way to corner BHO on the campaign trail with the cameras rolling and turn themselves into a media sensation overnight??? Especially if we were out of work plumbers in a tanking economy.
Joshua Norton
I can’t believe that the Repubs took the prototype of the bigmouth guy who sits in a bar and rants about all the things that are wrong with this country and made him a spokesman for their cause.
Palin & The Plumber – the "Dumb & Dumber" ticket of the GOoPer set. It would, no doubt, play well with the base.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
Joe the Plumber:
Again…… wish I was kidding. We’re down the rabbit hole, folks.
The Silent Fiddle of Nero
Where did Samuel the not-Plumber get his journalism and/or poli sci degrees from again?
Adrienne
I don’t think we should get away with filibusters, they are a valid and important tool of last resort for the minority party to utilize again the tyranny of the majority. The problem is that its use has been abused. It is not to be used just because the minority party doesn’t like something and they want to govern as if elections don’t have consequences, as is the case with the Republicans who are now threatening to filibuster the stimbill.
I agree 100% though that the "threat" of a filibuster should not be enough to block. Cloture votes be damned. If you truly believe the legislation of the majority is that harmful to the country that it should be blocked, then you should have the courage to stand up there and actually filibuster – bringing the Senate to a screeching halt, blocking all official business, and taking any and all blame for stopping the work of the legislature and openly trying to sabotage a very popular president who was elected to fix what THEY screwed up.
I say make ’em filibuster it. And when they do, The Dem leadership should turn the lights out, go out to the Capitol steps and give a press conference about how shitty the economy is – especially in blue/purple states or districts with Republican Senators or Representatives, and how Dems are trying to do something to alleviate the suffering of Americans, had already made concessions to the Repubs, and Repubs are doing nothing but acting like spoiled children while being obstructionist assholes while Dems are trying to do something.
Then have Obama himself give a press conference, or better yet, a televised talk with the nation, about his efforts to fix the economy and do what they elected him to do. Let him talk about how he tried to, in good faith, extend a hand and work with the Republicans to get a bill passed, even making concessions, and the House couldn’t deliver a single Republican vote despite the bill being 1/3 tax cuts. I’m sure as he talks about this, the cable networks will run footage of Obama meeting with them at the White House, footage of Obama coming to the Hill to meet with them, lists of the objectionable things Obama had taken out of the bill, lists of what the Senate Dems offered to put in the bill, etc. Let him look straight into the camera and talk about how he was elected in part to change the tone in Washington and how Republicans seem to revel in playing the same ol’ game of politics as usual and trying to score cheap political points as millions of people lose their jobs, the economy crumbles and children go to bed hungry.
Game over.
wilfred
Don’t underestimate the message, even if the messenger is a clown.
The great movement of the right is always against what they call moral ambiguity but which is in fact temperance against the worst forms of extremism. This fool is saying the same things he said in Israel, where Israel’s presumed moral ‘rightness’ justified barbarism and destruction – that according to every remotely objective observer who visited Gaza after the Israeli attacks.
Now it’s transported to Capitol Hill. I reckon you should pay attention. Economic crises have always been the breeding ground of reactionary extremism. This time there will little resistance since the left is effectively dead.
Zifnab
Nice work if you can get it. And if you get it, won’t you tell me how.
Joshua Norton
OMG! ! That is SO true. In fact I can recall being in those exact situations when I was a frosh. My love affair with Rand seemed to disappear in my sophomore year, though. Too many weird and creepy types to deal with.
Conservatively Liberal
IOW, we’re fucked.
Republicans are on this "save the equity & raise house prices!" kick, as if keeping house prices artificially high is going to make it easier to buy a home with a devastated middle and lower class. And that’s if you are lucky. We are bleeding ‘good paying jobs’, the very jobs that were created to soothe us because our manufacturing and jobs were being shipped overseas, at a rate that is wiping out the middle class. The loss of those jobs are killing off lower class employment.
Face it people, those of you who were engaged in the system in a white collar job supporting a financial or market institution, you just participated in cutting your own throat. Now that they have vacuumed up all of the cash they can from the economy, it is time to let you go. All they have left is to suck the government dry and it will all collapse.
Mission accomplished?
At least two things have to be done to recover quickly and with a minimum of pain, and there will be pain. I doubt we will do either:
1: Tax the fuck out of the obscenely rich, get that money into the government coffers and start distributing it back to the populace via works projects/infrastructure. I am talking Eisenhower-type of taxes but scaled for the gluttony of today. Doing this will prevent business from raping the shareholders and public (in the pricing of goods) by forcing them to reinvest in their company rather than just pocketing the cash. Why are executives hauling all of this cash home? Because our tax policy encourages it.
It’s no fun collecting outrageous sums of cash if the government takes most of it, and this acts as a check valve on excessive executive compensation. We removed this check valve and look what blew up in our faces.
2: Increase wages. Wages have been flat or declining for years now and everyone has been living on credit to make up the difference. Until people have money to spend they are not going to be willing to take on any additional debt. That is why the Republican plan to prop up house prices will not work. Even with the $15,000.00 they are talking about giving to first time home buyers, there are not enough first time home buyers who are in a good enough financial position to save the market. It will not happen. That and refinancing people into 50 year mortgages so they can ‘afford’ these overpriced homes is not wise. No, house prices have to fall back to where they were or forget it.
There is a lot more that needs to be done, like quit rewarding companies for exporting jobs, quit importing H1-Bs to avoid paying Americans good wages, stop the tax shelters like the Cayman Islands and much much more. This system is fucked up, it took years to pile this mess up and it is going to take years to untangle it. In the meantime, our representatives are going to try to sell us the rest of the way down the river.
While I hope Obama can make sense of this mess, I temper that with the reality that he has to work with the same people who got us in this mess. While the Republicans led the way, the Democrats followed along to make sure they didn’t miss out on the action. Both sides of the aisle got us in this mess and I can bet that both sides are going to be working against Obama when it benefits them, personally or politically, which is only going to make his job harder.
I really don’t see this turning out well. Sorry to sound pessimistic, but this is a huge clusterfuck we are in with no easy solution and only one person who is willing to try and lead. If you people think it is bad now, just wait. It’s going to get worse.
I know it.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@ksmiami:
I understand the sentiment. The problem is that the MSM has already settled on a new narrative, and are hard at work ratfucking the Obama administration. In the past week, Mitch Motherfucking McConnell has gotten more teevee face time than even the President, and Pelosi/Reid/Hoyer have been MIA.
Adrienne
Ummm, crack is wack?
Adrienne
Well, Hoyer and Pelosi did their jobs. They wrote the bill and it passed the House overwhelmingly. We know Reid is too busy bending over and taking it unlubed. We know this. However, what bothers me more that that is that the Democrats who I have seen on t.v. were all busy (basically) trashing the bill and agreeing with Republicans as if the Repubs have any interest in actually working with them. They don’t.
Case in point: After whining on t.v. about how there isn’t enough infrastructure money, they just voted down an amendment to do what? You guessed it – add more infrastructure money to the bill. These people are not serious and shouldn’t be treated as such, particularly not by the Democratic Party.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Conservatively Liberal:
CL, I’ve hung around the doomer blogs for years (Kunstler, LATOC), and on my darker days, I think you’re right. But if that is the end result, the goal, Mission Accomplished, then I have to wonder: what is Their (the infamous Them) plan? To live in guarded compounds and enjoy Their spoils, and try to keep Thunderdome at bay? Or is this just more incompetence and shortsightedness, where the plan is:
1. Get rich while wrecking the world;
2. ???
3. Live happily ever after.
jrg
Will someone please explain the concept of a "trade off" to this moron?
I’m sick of listening to bullshit like this. If you’re opposed to a trillion dollar war, you’re "pro-saddam". Yet, somehow, teaching kids that "God did it" is a scientific theory is good because it’s important to give "both sides of the story".
When did it become important for idiocy to be represented in every discussion we have, as a nation?
TheHatOnMyCat
Obama won the election by almost ten million votes. Why are we even talking about JTP, again? Can anyone here go out on the street and find three people who give a rat’s ass what this clown is saying or doing?
And, even the senile David Broder knows how bills get put together …. in conference. Not in the theatrics on the floor of the two houses. After all the posturing and pandering for the CSPAN cameras and the nightly news broadcasts, the passed bills are taken into conference and the real final bill is written. Those final bills will likely show little resemblance to the monstrosities that come from the floor votes.
If the addled Broder can figure that out and turn it into a blurb about "best thinking" (a rather powerful euphemism if there ever was one) then maybe even the hyena blogs can get a clue what is actually going on here. A bill will reach the president’s desk in a couple or three weeks and there will be a signing.
Conservatively Liberal
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon):
I don’t think there is a ‘nefarious goal’ but rather a mindset among certain types of people that there is no such thing as being ‘too rich’. So they pursue things that make them richer, and over the years they have acted like termites eating away at the foundation of a home. They bribed and paid off congresscritters to pay lower taxes, to offshore jobs, to bring in cheap labor, to move wealth offshore, to keep wages flat and so on and so on. Now the foundation of our system is eaten away and there is little foundation left to build on again.
I really think this is more of a ‘I’m going to get mine’ taken to an extreme that some thought would never happen. Some ‘richies’ really believe that wealth creates wealth and that this was an endless game to acquire assets to see who gets to die with the most money and toys. These folks believe in infinite and do not know the meaning of the word finite.
No, this was just pure, rotten, unchecked greed.
gbear
Search out videos of Barney Frank on the news shows. He’s the only democrat who’s sticking up for the bill and sticking it to the republicans (i.e: the republicans didn’t mind spending a trillion dollars when it came to the war in Iraq). Barney needs to be on the news shows 24/7.
Obama could talk for hours about the benefits of the stimulus bill, and the first question from the media would be about his failed cabinet picks, and that would be the only part of the story covered on the news shows that night.
The media, clueless to the irony and hypocricy of their stance, only wants to know why he’s failing.
maya
Just think of Joe Wurzelbacher as Will Rodgers with a drain snake instead of a lasso.
Keith
I find it fascinating that Congressional aides are supposedly excited to talk to JTP to get his "real-world/average Joe" perspective on issues affecting government, when they could simply talk to their own constituents. No need to fly the guy into DC and hit the luncheon circuit; just read your mail!
headpan
This is the reason they, apparently, do not believe The Great Depression was real, sorta like Holocaust deniers, really.
bartkid
Has anyone else noticed that David Broder and Joe the Plumber have never been in the same room together.
Hmm.