Quotulatiousness

April 8, 2011

QotD: the international double standard

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Italy, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:39

A long time ago we had a president who was doing a chubby intern.

And some Americans got uptight about it.

And we were told by Europeans everywhere ‘Relax, it’s just sex. He’s the leader of the country, they have mistresses, it happens get over it you uptight prudes.’

So now with Silvio Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes and orgies and I don’t know what-all I guess that makes Europe — and Italy in particular — about eighteen times more sophisticated [1] than us hicks in the United States and so-on and so-forth.

Y’all must be so proud.

[1] Sarcasm.

Brian Dunbar, “Sophisticated Europe”, Space for Commerce, by Brian Dunbar, 2011-04-07

February 3, 2011

Bipartisan big government

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Bruce F. Webster addresses the “Clinton Budget Fallacy” by downloading some publicly accessible numbers and doing a bit of simple math:

Put simply, from 1999 to 2010, the US population grew by 10% and inflation reduced the value of the dollar by about 30%. Combine those two, and Federal spending should have gone up roughly 43% over that period. Instead, it went up 135%, or three times what it should have. Setting aside some of the bailouts, etc., that are in the budget, it’s still clear that almost every Federal line item went up at least twice what it should have during that period. Almost nothing (other than “general government”) grew a “mere” 43%.

I fully blame Bush and the 2002-2006 Republicans as much as I blame Obama and the 2006-2010 Democrats. The real question is whether the 2010 Republicans have the brains and the will to turn back the tide.

The smart money, I’m afraid, is betting against that outcome.

September 21, 2009

Hate the president: it’s a hallowed tradition

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:27

Steve Chapman looks at the long, long, long history of President Derangement Syndrome:

A new president, pursuing policies well within the political mainstream, evokes weirdly angry and intense denunciations from opponents—a reaction hard to explain in terms of anything he has actually done. Does that suggest, as Jimmy Carter insists, that their true motivation lies in racism?

No, it doesn’t, because I’m not talking about Barack Obama. I’m talking about George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — both of whom, from the day they took office, managed to convince a minority of Americans that they were not just wrong but illegitimate, dangerous, and thoroughly evil. Obama’s troubles are not exactly unprecedented.

[. . .]

So you don’t need to turn to race to explain the virulent animosity against Obama. What all the presidents who previously endured irresponsible slander had in common, after all, is that they were white.

Clinton’s experience suggests that merely being a Democrat is enough to evoke hysteria in some quarters. In matters of policy, he was about as congenial as any conservative could have hoped — cooperating with Republicans to balance the budget, advancing free trade, rejecting an international treaty banning land mines, signing welfare reform, and threatening to bomb North Korea over its nuclear program. Yet even today, many on the right regard him as an extreme liberal.

I don’t remember President Ford rousing the standard levels of derangement among his opponents, but that could be because it was before I started paying much attention to U.S. politics. Other than Ford, all the other occupants of that office seem to have generated deep animosity (Nixon? Hell yeah. Carter? Yep. Reagan? A subgenre of musical animosity. Bush I? Yep.)

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