Ahh, Newt.
So you are good for something:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/Z1jMaeoBrCs” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
[Cackles maliciously]Open thread, anyone?
My Enemy’s Enemy
This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Good News For Conservatives
Forum Transmitted Disease
Hey, if Newt’s willing to drive the knife in, I’ve got a shovel, a truck, and a nice spot in the desert where nobody goes. Gimme a call, Newt, K?
JCT
Telling Romney to stop lying (or to grow a spine for that matter) is like telling the guy to stop breathing. Benen has a wicked mendacity list today.
Corner Stone
I can’t stand it! I know you planned it!
In honor of MCA.
Chris
Oh, I agree. Say what you want about Newt Gingrich, but he’s absolutely on point when it comes to slapping Romney around.
“The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is because you lost to Ted Kennedy in 94!”
Zing! Funny because true…
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
A few details for those of us who cannot access videos please.
Culture of Truth
Mittens and George
Politically Lost
As I watched the ad, I thought for sure it was going to be an outside group that made it. Much to my surprise and pleasure to see that the ad was the president’s. They are going to fight this time around. And, fight hard.
Good. About time.
gaz
It was only a matter of time. This is the fruit of their superPac primary season. They’re still trying to scrub the blood off of the floor.
ETA: UNLIMITED AMOUNTS OF ANONYMOUS CORPORATE CASH! VICTORY!
Mark S.
If only Hitler had said something about global warming.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@JCT:
__
Mitt is the most shameless liar in American politics since Richard Nixon.
Culture of Truth
Associated Press:
Romney Targets 4 Percent Unemployment
Washington (AP) – Jostling for an advantage on the economy, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Friday set a target of 4 percent for the nation’s unemployment rate…
“Anything over 4 percent is not cause for celebration,” Romney said.
jl
Mitt hectoring ridiculous stuff again:
TPM Editor’s Blog
‘Four Percent Is Not A Realistic Target’
David Kurtz May 4, 2012, 1:22 PM 197
Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin tells TPM that, despite what Mitt Romney said today about any unemployment rate above 4 percent not being worth celebrating, “4 percent is not a realistic target.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/05/four_percent_is_not_a_realistic_target.php?ref=fpblg
Cannot even keep Holtz-Eakin on board, and that is sayng a lot.
Linda Featheringill
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Summary:
Swiss bank accounts, immigration, Bain Capital destroying companies, and ……
“Are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?”
“Yes.”
jl
@Mark S.:
You know who else liked vegetables, don’t you?
And what did the NObamas plant in the White House garden?
That’s right, vegetables!
tamied
@Mark S.: These people are truly nuts!
Politically Lost
@Mark S.:
I followed the links and found this as support for Climategate.
If you’re quoting McMegan, you are on the right track.
Yutsano
@Culture of Truth: Did Willard lay out any sort of detailed plan to getting to that 4%? Anyone? Bueller? The fact is 4% unemployment in a nation our size is virtually impossible to maintain with our current wealth inequality Mittens. Try again.
Ben Cisco
This is one Newtron bomb that I hope is effective.
Martin
@Culture of Truth: Anyone care to point out that a 96% free market employment goal is incompatible with their assertion that the 34% of Americans that receive some form of assistance are all lazy good for nothing looters?
We get local incidences of 4% unemployment, but the Soviet Union was the last government to achieve it on a national scale for an extended period of time.
Culture of Truth
AP: “If Romney wins the White House, his 4 percent unemployment target could come back to haunt him.”
also, flying monkey could disrupt next year’s Super Bowl.
BGinCHI
I guarantee you Newt thought this to himself:
“If I had only switched parties earlier in the process I could have beaten Obama in the primaries.”
NancyDarling
@Mark S.: That unabomber billboard is hilarious. It’s the equivalent of saying I should stop liking dogs because Hitler liked dogs.
JCT
@Martin: Hey, why are you trying to inject the truth here? This is a Mitt Romney thread.
Culture of Truth
@Yutsano: Yes, his plan to bring back the policies of George W Bush.
also, this is relevant:
The jobless rate fell to 3.8 percent the last year of Bill Clinton’s Presidency. George W. Bush saw unemployment shift during his presidency from 4.2 percent at the start of his administration to above 7 percent at its end.
jl
@Yutsano: Probably just frictional unemployment from people entering and leaving labor force for education, family responsibilities, moving, etc, and normal structural adjustment will produce an unemployment rate > 4 percent.
Even back before the nasty 70s, 5 percent was the usual target, which was not expected to be met except during expansion.
Rosalita
@JCT:
I loved it. It’s also frightening. But as it was noted in comments over there, there needs to be more exposure of this crap so that the public doesn’t accept what he’s dishing out.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Yutsano:
__
This is classic passive-aggresive asshole CEO behavior. Deliberately set an unachievable sales quota that has no basis in reality, just so you can use it later as an excuse to short people their commissions and then fire them, because “they didn’t make their goals”.
rlrr
@Yutsano:
Mitt’s plan:
1. Cut taxes (for the 1%)
2. Increase military spending (war with Iran, you know)
4. Balance the budget (remember when Reagan balanced the budget by cutting taxes and increasing military spending?)
5. PROFIT!
Also, cut regulations (living in a dystopian hellscape will be fun).
eric
@Martin: i remember this fight in the 80s and 90s with people like Reich saying that the fed’s view of full employment at 5% or so was nonsense. I am too lazy to google, but i think i recall krugman and others beating up on the left-er economists for this view. so 4% is old school soci a l ism. bring it mittens
jl
@Martin: Aren’t you confusing unemployment rate with employment/population ratio?
If Mitt got confused about those things, he is a true intellectual mess, and if he meant 4 percent of population unemployed or not in labor force, he is nuts.
Unless he is taking up Newt’s idea that we should start working in kindergarten and keep at it until we drop dead.
Tonal Crow
4% unemployment? And rainbow-flavored nine-winged holy unicorns with Christ on their backs will fly out of my ass.
Republican bullshit: it’s all they have.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Yutsano:
Even if it were economically possible, the illustrious Fed would never allow it. Remember the 1990s, Mitt? Back when Alan Greenspan’s greatest nightmare was that some worker somewhere in America might be seeing his/her wages go up? 4% unemployment would result in double-digit interest rates… which would make unemployment go right back up again.
[winger]
Suck it, Libs! ROMNEY will create 27 zillion jobs per second! And reduce unemployment to negative eleventy-billion percent! VICTROY!
[/winger]
(Been coding all day, perhaps not in the best frame of mind… time to head home).
gbear
UNLIMITED CORPORATE EMPLOYMENT!
VICTORY!!
Linda Featheringill
And you do know who else had almost no unemployment, don’t you?
Steve in DC
@rlrr
To be fair defense spending is actually a really good jobs program. It also has the side effect of landing us all sorts of cool goodies like jet aircraft, submersible vessels, computers, the internet, I could go own but these are all crazy things that only exist because the DOD threw money at them even when private industry figured it was too expensive and not profitable. If you don’t like defense spending you don’t get to like the internet either.
Which is one of the more hilarious things about the Republicans hatred of stimulus and government jobs programs, the DOD is the biggest stimulus and jobs program there is and it’s insanely effective when you view it from that angle and has the bonus of producing all sorts of technology that filters back into the private sector to improve it.
It’s hilarious
Conservative “government never accomplished anything”
Rational person “what about nuclear power, space travel, and the internet”
Mike E
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Or, from Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland:
Svensker
@Tonal Crow:
Really? Can I come by you?
But seriously, this ad made me laugh.
Napoleon
@Steve in DC:
Actually it is not – it generates a lot less jobs then spending the same amount of money on other things, like bridges.
RossinDetroit
4% unemployment would be disastrous for businesses. It’s close to if not below the frictional rate. Businesses would have to raise pay to attract talent. I’ve been on the selling side of that deal and it’s a nice feeling to see your billing rate go up to $1/minute.
Why does Mitt Romney hate American businesses so much?
Steve in DC
@Napoleon
We could do both you know! And while bridges are important and all, it was “wasteful defense spending” that gave us the internet. You don’t really get crazy ass technology without being willing to flush money down the tube because it might not work and costs go nuts.
jl
@Steve in DC:
The resurgence in US gold mining is a result of some relatively inexpensive US Bureau of Mine research projects on heap leach mining
Heap Leaching
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_leaching
Even Ron Paul should like, though I am not sure he understands where gold comes from.
kerFuFFler
@Mark S.:
Yeah, I saw that too! They can’t fight the science honestly so they resort to tactics like this. I’m pretty sure Hitler was in favor of people wiping their asses—-is the practice discredited now?
Villago Delenda Est
GINGRICH TO ROMNEY: BE HONEST
“Na gonna happen; wouldn’t be prudent!”
Zifnab25
@Steve in DC:
Those don’t count.
jl
@RossinDetroit: Yes, that is what the whole debate about NAIRU, the natural rate of unemployment, was about. How low can you drive the unemployment rate before you hit lower bound produced by frictional, and even in peaceful uneventful times some structural, unemployment? And to go below that level (the exact value of which is unknown) you have to fool people into taking jobs they would not otherwise by raising nominal pay above the amount consistent with a low expected rate of inflation.
Mountains of research on that over last thirty years, resulting in confusion.
catclub
@Napoleon: In the reality we have, where huge amounts are spent by the DOD on research and development, lots of good things are spun off by same.
In a world with zero DOD research funding, we might still end up with nice things funded by research on different things.
AT&T – Bell Labs, to the extent it was not a DOD research center, still did some good work. Likewise Xerox and Kodak, and Polaroid, and Intel.
jl
Romney may end up defeating himself with his shrill insistent hectoring of dubious stuff.
The press would like to go along but when you have even the most popular go-to media talking head GOP economists bolting, you have a problem.
Similar to, I think, the very obvious nasty goofiness and incoherence of McCain/Palin ticket that made even the very sympathetic press to periodically give up at critical times of the campaign and publicly admit they could not sell that BS.
And Mitt does not throw good BBQ and tire swing, and his schtick produces irritation in most ordinary people (aka, the corporate media audience) so not sure how long corporate press can stick with their natural sympathies.
Mitt took a five minute break to go along with McCain and say that the Obama trip to Afghanistan was a good thing.
But looks like Mitt is already back to hectoring the poor long suffering people of these great United States with irritating hectoring BS that even the standard front men will not go along with.
How can he win with that lousy act?
Raven
@Zifnab25: Tang, not the poon kind, the drink..
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve in DC:
As Zinfab25 pointed out, those don’t count.
Nor does the Interstate Highway system, the TVA and Hoover Dam, or the building of the railroads in the 19th century.
The stupid of “conservatives”. It burns.
seanindc
attention JOHN COLE: for nights that you cannot sleep, allow me to offer this humble remedy
oh and you’re welcome….
Martin
@jl: Not really. The Soviets never got all that much higher than us in terms of labor participation.
Pretty much the only way to have a 4% employment rate is to constantly have many more jobs than labor, which is why you only see it during expansion. But in a market condition, the market still needs the labor – and the market will find a way to address it – either by expanding productivity of captured workers to make up for the shortfall (funny how productivity gets shoved on us no matter whether the market it weak or strong) or by shifting the jobs overseas or by importing workers. That really low unemployment rate in the 90s is what drove much of the outsourcing and H1B importing – companies needed labor and couldn’t get it here. Universities had trouble even keeping students in college because of the labor demand. And so when the market slows, those other things remain in place – the jobs are outsourced, the immigrants are here, the productivity levels are maintained, and then jobs are cut and unemployment results.
There’s a natural unemployment rate that comes from everyday decisions that employers and employees make. Employment equilibrium in the US is somewhere in the 5%-6% range, and the only way to beat that is to have a market which is out of equilibrium – either too many workers or too many jobs. Because employers have all of the power in this country, the latter problem solves itself though policy. Unions are the only real tool the country has to deal with a surplus of workers.
But the Soviets and other fully socialist countries could maintain a near 0% unemployment rate by simply creating jobs out of thin air. If you were of working age, you worked. A sustained 4% rate requires that kind of guarantee – that the government can create jobs at will. The only way the free market can do that is through a prolonged economic expansion, which is nigh impossible under Republican policies right now.
BGinCHI
Mitt Romney: Master of the Imaginary Economy
Surreal American
Next thing you know, Rmoney will state that the DJIA will be 50,000 by the end of his first term.
Suffern ACE
@Martin: Martin, who says they won’t be using Soviet techniques with those layabouts. I think it was Carl Pallandino who had the idea of using unused prisons as kind of a worker gathering point where the layabouts would do labor to teach them good work values.
Tonal Crow
@jl:
I sure hope Obama takes advantage of his ability to ply the press with, you know, liquid intoxicants that are (currently) legal. Never (never!) underestimate how much mileage you can get from filling the press’s stomachs with an abundance of pleasant fare.
kdaug
“What’s in the BOX????”
jl
I see on yahoo news that number one Mitt rock star Ted Nugent freaked out and got nasty on TV when it was implied in a question that he was not a moderate.
Meanwhle, the BidenGaffe of the day is that he toasted Cinco de Mayo with a glass of water. Which is supposed to be bad luck for those Irish.
The campaign of LULZ, this one will be.
redshirt
@Suffern ACE: The world needs ditch diggers too, Danny.
Martin
@Steve in DC: For what we spend on Defense, we could send every single 18-24 year old in the US to college, free of charge, through to a PhD.
That would remove as many people from the workforce as are currently unemployed, and maintain the same number of jobs as defense spending, and likely yield vastly more breakthroughs and discoveries.
It’s a truly absurd amount of money we spend on defense.
Anoniminous
The Conservative scum from the Heartland Institute (no link because I don’t want to give the bastards the traffic) sez:
Culture of Truth
M Bachmann already promised $2.00 gallon gas, so why not.
jl
This is why I think the Mitt BSing of the day hurts him: he oversells, and oversells in an irritating and self defeating way.
Most people don’t know anything about the natural rate of unemployment, or whether, in a good economy the unemployment rate should be 3 or 4 or 5 percent.
But the Mittster said that anything over 4 percent is not cause for celebration.
Basically, he BS’d that any improvement that leaves the unemployment rate above that was garbage and didn’t count.
Now that is weird and unreasonable thing to say, and I think most reasonable people can sense that. Especially people who have been looking for work a long time and now have an easier time finding jobs; it is still too difficult, but easier.
That is Mitt’s BSing weakness, he oversells. And has to be irritating and hectoring while he over sells.
As I said, like a swindler who has talked you so far into the deal, your pen is swinging down to sign the contract that will destroy you. And then he starts yelling totally outrageous BS, and you throw down the pen and walk off.
Do other people have that impression?
rlrr
@Steve in DC:
Rational person “what about nuclear power, space travel, and the internet”
Other than that, what has government ever done for us? ;)
rlrr
@Culture of Truth:
Tanking the economy would bring gas prices down…
rlrr
@Steve in DC:
To be fair defense spending is actually a really good jobs program.
True, but increasing defense spending will not bring down the deficit…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@catclub:
As loath as I am to agree with Steve in DC its generally agreed that military needs have been a tremendous spur to technology, the airplane being the prime example. In an ideal world the driving need to make better aircraft shouldn’t be to blow shit up, but that’s how it works.
Meanwhile Mitten’s problem with Daddy Warbucks is the US military doesn’t’ really need or even want all that much more stuff. This isn’t 1980 were we need to have a large land army in Germany and a Navy able to keep that army supplied.
Mark S.
@Martin
Almost half the world’s total. And a lot of it is spent on weapons and hardware that would be useful against Russia or China but worthless against Taliban insurgents living in caves.
jl
@rlrr: Ah, the GOP plan all fits together. It does make sense.
trollhattan
That ad is full of awesome sauce. Is there any bond in human experience or chemistry, for that matter, greater than the bond between Newt and a camera?
Give that man two martinis and leave the recorder rolling.
Also, too, this would be the ideal thread for RealityVera-whatever the li’l bot is calling itself today–to drop by and tell us how Willard is PERFECTLY positioned to steamroll Obama.
rlrr
@Napoleon:
Actually it is not – it generates a lot less jobs then spending the same amount of money on other things, like bridges.
Also medical care.
jl
@trollhattan: There is no force known to humankind greater than that between Newt and the public spotlight. Sundering it too quickly could tear the fabric of time and space, and blow up the universe.
Joseph Nobles
@trollhattan: I would be a first adopter of the “Newt +2” podcast.
gaz
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: agreed. We’re using a DARPA project right now. Just sayin’
ETA: Not to mention the humble origins of our computers (eniac * cough *).. it’s not just for guiding projectiles anymore ;)
Mike E
@Raven: Damn, did I ever drink an ass-ton of that wretched orange concoction!
Citizen_X
@kerFuFFler: Since it’s highway billboards we’re talking about, how about a picture of Hitler with the words, “YOU KNOW WHO ELSE LIKED NICE HIGHWAYS?”
rlrr
@jl:
Nice to see Romney locking up the draft dodger vote.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Steve in DC: Hey, it’s my favorite GOP talking points concern troll, back to spray some more Rove-approved goodness all over the thread!
You just get off work, Steve? Or more precisely, I guess I should ask:
Did you just get to work, Steve?
rlrr
@Citizen_X:
One can still drive on some of Hitler’s highways…
jl
@rlrr: And especially the actual in real history pants pissing and sh*tting draft dodger vote. That is a special breed of draft dodger.
Edit: why go to all the work of running off to Canada or Sweden when you can sit around and piss and shit your pants for week, and get the military to send you home for being a disgusting nut case?
RossinDetroit
@jl:
That was priceless. Gets huffy and insulted, and defends himself with foul language. Way to sell your point, Ted.
He may be a nice guy to those who know him well but he sure isn’t to strangers according to numerous local anecdotes.
Suffern ACE
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Which is why we need to sour relations with those countries immediately. Bolton should be able to do that in his first 90 days on the job. Heck, with Bolton on the job, even the Canadians will be asking for membership in the CIS.
Anoniminous
@Anoniminous:
Mark S. was already on it.
gaz
@Steve in DC:
How’s that working out right about now? I guess one out of three ain’t bad. Too bad they’re trying to choke that too now. (admittedly along with too many dems)
Culture of Truth
Pittsburgh (AP) – Walking a careful line, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Friday he had wanted an openly gay spokesman who resigned from his campaign this week to stay on. Hours later, he worked to court the party’s conservative wing by meeting with former rival Rick Santorum.
Julia Grey
As a single government entity DOD may very well be spending the most dollars. HOWEVER.
1) It doesn’t create or maintain long-term American transport or infrastructure (which benefits the economy for decades) or maintain or improve our human capital (the worth of which is literally incalculable) the way things like education, housing and health care do.
2) It and its employees spend vast amounts of money OVERSEAS, not into American pockets or businesses.
3) It spends considerable amounts of the money on things which are literally END products which will be destroyed, blown up or otherwise disposed of without making any further contribution to the economy, even in providing opportunities for maintenance jobs. Which is a little like going and burying pallets of money in a desert. Hmmm.
I would say DOD spending, overall, is probably LESS effective as a stimulus to American jobs, even considering the contributions of technology (which is not a military monopoly, after all), than spending in almost any other American government department.
gaz
@Culture of Truth: Uh oh, somebody let Romney speak in PA? there goes 20 electoral points to Obama…
lol
Linda Featheringill
I saw this Republican ad complaining about Obama taking credit for killing OBL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsrSAqRrCc0&feature=player_embedded
I personally think they’re doing the Dems a favor here. Go for it.
Also, how many people do you know are going to be influenced by Huffington?
Mnemosyne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
To paraphrase our current president, I’m not against defense spending, just against stupid defense spending.
Defense spending on long-term projects like the internet or space travel: good
Defense spending on new equipment that doesn’t work and — more importantly — that the armed forces don’t even want: bad
gaz
@Julia Grey:
Your entire post has good points and I’d like to add that last I checked we get something like $0.65 back for every dollar we put towards “defense”
OTOH, it’s one of the only politically reliable ways to spend gobs of public dough on expensive research projects. That said, the DoD isn’t really spearheading a ton of research at the moment, so that further diminishes it’s value, though my guess is it’d be tough to quantify it.
We need some sort of alternative. The latter 20th century shows us what advances in military research, and * gasp * spending on “total war” can do. Almost everything we rely on today is due to massive military spending in the 20th during WWII and later on the Cold War. I’m not saying I like it. I’m saying we need to replace that kind of drive with something else. I just don’t know how to work around the fundamental human problem that most tech advances in human history are had when people set about to destroy each other. nothing else seems to motivate mobs of people as thoroughly as war. =/
Sly
@Steve in DC:
Conservatives are fine with things like military Keynesianism so long as the social gains (like computers) are then privatized and a white guy in a suit can pocket 30% or more off subsequent transactions and kick some of that money back to a politician who extols the virtues of non-interventionism.
You know, the Free Market?
@Martin:
So our options are:
A) Mitt Romney is a closet Communist.
B) Mitt Romney is a closet Minskyite (government can supply job guarantees that won’t incur a hit from NAIRU)
C) Mitt Romney doesn’t know shit about modern economics.
I’ll go with C.
piratedan
if indeed this an Open Thread…..
http://www.happyplace.com/11117/the-best-protest-signs-spotted-at-occupy-wall-street/page/1
I had a happy face when seeing some of these again….
MikeJ
@Mnemosyne:
There really wasn’t even much spending on the internet, and most of it was in pretty nebulous research projects.
(D)ARPA doesn’t go out and spend fifty billion dollars on a new bomb. They have little trickles of money for interesting little side projects that even if they work might not be of any military use. The entire budget for DARPA is about $3B, from a a total DoD budget of almost $675B(not counting supplementals).
gaz
@piratedan: my favorite was this one http://static.happyplace.com/assets/images/2012/05/4fa15888ed7dd.jpg
thanks for the link.
gnomedad
@Anoniminous:
Sane people do not advocate global warming, they notice it. Assholes.
Martin
@Sly: Yeah, I’d go with C as well. My guess is he thinks he can tax cut us back to the 90s economic expansion, which is fucking stupid. The 90s economic expansion happened on the back of a tax increase.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Sly:
__
or:
__
D) Mitt knows just enough modern economics to understand that 4% is an unreachable target and picked a figure that low on purpose, to make Obama look bad without taking even a tiny risk that we might get close to his magic number.
__
I’ll go with D. I don’t think 4% was an accident. That is too close to being the highest possible number that is completely implausible for it to have been a random pick.
FlipYrWhig
@redshirt: I think Romney is TOTALLY Judge Smails.
FlipYrWhig
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I think you give him too much credit. I think he took 8 and divided it by 2.
Lojasmo
@Napoleon:
He’s notable for regurgitating RW talking points with an anti-GOP slant. Anything to validate RW pablum.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sly:
If by “modern economics” you mean anything from Adam Smith onward (The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776) then I’d agree with you, because it’s painfully obvious that he’s never read Smith.
Villago Delenda Est
@MikeJ:
Furthermore, you have to realize that DARPA put out the money to start the research that led to the internet because DoD was told, flat out, by Ma Bell that the concept of computers talking to each other over phone lines was impossible.
Yeah, that’s right. The private sector rejected the idea of the internet. So it was up to DARPA to make it happen.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yahoo has a lot of butt hurt with the Obama admin over something one of their columnist did. Today they have an article accusing Obama of having “rose colored glasses”. Is the Right deliberately trying to make Obama the New Ronald Regean?
Amir Khalid
@jl:
Biden’s a teetotaler. What are his options?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Suffern ACE:
Well if Mitten did a full Kaiser William III and forced the rest of the world to unite against us that would mean 4% unemployment.
chopper
then your presidency is going to be a real downer, chump.
i like how mittens has entered the next stage of his feeble attempt at a candidacy, namely making crazy promises.
jl
@Amir Khalid: Maybe seltzer water? Anyway, that was what brought LULZ to my mind.
John M. Burt
The only way to have a 4% unemployment rate is the way the USSR did it: lie your ass off.
Older
@Villago Delenda Est: The “private” sector, huh? That was not the free market speaking, it was Ma Bell, a government-approved monopoly, and a lazy one. They also said we couldn’t have answering machines and 25 foot cords, among other things, because they just didn’t want to be bothered. Europe beat us in a lot of phone related technology because they were not being strangled by good old Ma Bell.
gaz
@Older: A general rule is that the larger the company, the less they have to bother with those meddlesome details such as the free market, or laws.
Those are for the little guys.
Cacti
Mitt Romney just called Ronald Reagan a failure.
He left office in January 1989 with a 5.4% unemployment rate.
gaz
@John M. Burt:
That totally explains Rmoney’s position. He’s been practicing so that he’ll be up to the challenge.
Fluke bucket
Damn I need a cigarette after that one. And a warm, moist towelette.
Rick Taylor
Mitt Romney’s leadership in doubt if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me!
gaz
@Rick Taylor: I just shared that with my wife and we had a lulz. Thanks for the link =)