I am surprised they showed the signs sm

• Nonviolence - Lurker
  • Lurker, there is hope yet ....sm - LVMT
    • Impeachment - Lurker
      • Yes, they did - LVMT
        • There is not a hope in heck of ... - Observer
          • With this logic.... - Teddy
    • Those numbers are GROSSLY exaggerated. sm - Brunson
      • Some grossly minimized the numbers sm - LVMT
    • I especially liked the sign behind the singers... - Observer
      • I am surprised they showed the signs sm - LVMT
        • I do not know how anyone could think... - Observer
          • The list of anomalies...... sm - LVMT
            • 9-11 Inside job - Observer
        • I doubt a lot of conservatives were there. sm - Brunson
          • That is what I heard. Do you mean Republican? sm - LVMT
            • I mean conservatives. sm - Brunson
  • I read this...and I believe the sentiments... - Observer

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Who do they think they are, gathering and exercising their first amendment rights like that?  And  all those signs came from republican central planning, didn't they?  Maybe there could have been heavier attendance, but many of the potential supporters actually have jobs. 

The MMM was organized by Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.  It would have been soooooo politically incorrect before, during and after the million man march to characterize all the participants as nuts, sexist racist kooks with a single hateful agenda, trouble makers, disgruntled black men just looking to cause problems. 

Yet the reverse is excactly how tea party participants were portrayed, which is okey-dokey with most people. 

In the dish it out/take it department, the left has pretty a sweet deal because they can say the most prejudiced, outrageous things about the right and get by with it.  But when the right criticizes the left it is always claimed that we are selfish, racist, sexist, homophobic bigots.  It's not about your race, your gender, or your lifestyle.  It's about socialism versus capitalism, okay? 

All you Obama crucifiers had better quickly figure out a way to blame this on Obama!  LOL.

http://www.knowthelies.com/?q=node/55

President Has Issued 750 Statements That He May Revise or Disregard Measures.

WASHINGTON (June 27) -- The White House on Tuesday defended President Bush's prolific use of bill signing statements, saying There's this notion that the president is committing acts of civil disobedience, and he's not, said Bush's press secretary Tony Snow, speaking at the White House. It's important for the president at least to express reservations about the constitutionality of certain provisions.

Snow spoke as Senate Judiciary Committe Chairman Arlen Specter opened hearings on Bush's use of bill signing statements saying he reserves the right to revise, interpret or disregard a measure on national security and consitutional grounds. Such statements have accompanied some 750 statutes passed by Congress -- including a ban on the torture of detainees and the renewal of the Patriot Act.

There is a sense that the president has taken signing statements far beyond the customary purview, Specter, R-Pa., said.

It's a challenge to the plain language of the Constitution, he added. I'm interested to hear from the administration just what research they've done to lead them to the conclusion that they can cherry-pick.

A Justice Department lawyer defended Bush's statements.

Even if there is modest increase, let me just suggest that it be viewed in light of current events and Congress' response to those events, said Justice Department lawyer Michelle Boardman. The significance of legislation affecting national security has increased markedly since Sept. 11..

Congress has been more active, the president has been more active, she added. The separation of powers is working when we have this kind of dispute.

Specter's hearing is about more than the statements. He's been compiling a list of White House practices he bluntly says could amount to abuse of executive power -- from warrantless domestic wiretapping program to sending officials to hearings who refuse to answer lawmakers' questions.

But the session also concerns countering any influence Bush's signing statements may have on court decisions regarding the new laws. Courts can be expected to look to the legislature for intent, not the executive, said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas., a former state judge.

There's less here than meets the eye, Cornyn said. The president is entitled to express his opinion. It's the courts that determine what the law is.

But Specter and his allies maintain that Bush is doing an end-run around the veto process. In his presidency's sixth year, Bush has yet to issue a single veto that could be overridden with a two-thirds majority in each house.

The president is not required to (veto), Boardman said.

Of course he's not if he signs the bill, Specter snapped back.

Instead, Bush has issued hundreds of signing statements invoking his right to interpret or ignore laws on everything from whistleblower protections to how Congress oversees the Patriot Act.

It means that the administration does not feel bound to enforce many new laws which Congress has passed, said David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues. This raises profound rule of law concerns. Do we have a functioning code of federal laws?

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 14, 2009

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.
“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

who waited outside for 5-6 hours in freezing temps just to save maybe $50.  Lord have mercy.  I guess I'm thankful I don't need or want anything enough to do that!!

You're right about the me-me-me and it makes me sick.  People will kill each other for a dollar!! 

unfortunately.

The pub way of thinking on this is to go ahead and let those workers lose their jobs, then save the auto industry, and then they can hire back those workers or others without any job security, benefits, etc...   

Under republican rule, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (and that obviously hasn't worked out so well).  So, who on this board is getting richer, and if you are getting poorer, can you really afford (financially) to be republican?

The pub way of thinking on this is to go ahead and let those workers lose their jobs, then save the auto industry, and then they can hire back those workers or others without any job security, benefits, etc...   

Under republican rule, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (and that obviously hasn't worked out so well).  So, who on this board is getting richer, and if you are getting poorer, can you really afford (financially) to be republican?

Normally, equality (except for Fox) and sense in her posts.