GeorgeWBush « Quotulatiousness

November 4, 2011

The libertarian subtext to . . . Harold and Kumar?

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: GeorgeWBush, Libertarianism, Movies, Philosophy — Nicholas @ 11:05

David Boaz reviews the philosophical and economic underpinnings of the Harold and Kumar movies:

Escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger . . . to find ample food and unlimited choices . . . the pursuit of happiness . . . the American Dream. Yes, I think writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were on to something.

And then in the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, after another improbable road trip, the fugitive youths literally dropped in on George W. Bush’s Texas ranch. In the increasingly fantastic plot, the president invited them to join him in hiding from the scary Cheney, shared his pot with them, and then promised to clear up the unfortunate misunderstanding that landed them in Guantanamo Bay. An uninhibited but still skeptical Kumar said, “I’m not sure I trust our government any more, sir.” And President Bush delivered this ringing libertarian declaration:

Hey, I’m in the government, and I don’t even trust it. You don’t have to trust your government to be a patriot. You just have to trust your country.

Harold & Kumar: more wisdom than a month of right-wing talk radio. Hurwitz and Schlossberg get what America is about.

Not having seen any of the movies, that certainly sounds like the kindest treatment George W. Bush has ever received from Hollywood.

Comments (2)

October 14, 2011

Jonathan Turley: “President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: BarackObama, CrimeAndPunishment, GeorgeWBush, Secrecy, Terrorism — Nicholas @ 09:18

In an interview at NPR, Jonathan Turley explains that while President Bush was bad news for civil liberties, President Obama has been even worse:

It is a strong language, but I think civil libertarians are coming to grips with what is really a building disaster for our movement, and it’s been a rather difficult process. You know, I have a large civil liberties blog, and there’s a lot of soul-searching among civil libertarians about what exactly happened. But we are engaging in a sense of collective denial when we deal with President Obama.

[. . .]

And I think that’s part of the purpose of this column, is to address the fact that President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties. He not only adopted most of President Bush’s policies in the civil liberties areas when it comes to terrorism, but he actually expanded on them. He outdid George Bush.

And they range. His position on torture and refusing to have people investigated or prosecuted for torture, on privacy lawsuits. He pushed aggressively for the dismissal of dozens of lawsuits brought by private interest organizations. He’s for immunity for people who engaged in warrantless surveillance. He has fought standing for people even to be able to get courts to review his programs, much like George Bush. He kept military tribunals and the authority to make the discretionary choice of sending some people to a real court, some people to a military tribunal. He has asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens based solely on his own discretion, that he believes them to be a threat to the country.

His administration has, once again, as with the Bush administration, cited secret law, that — and including a case of assassinating citizens — a law that we’re not allowed to see, but we have to trust them.

[. . .]

They just have a very difficult time opposing a man who’s an icon and has made history — the first black president, but also the guy that replaced George Bush. And the result is something akin to the Stockholm syndrome, where you’ve got this identification with your captor. I mean, the Democratic Party is split, civil libertarians are split, and the Democratic Party itself is now viewed by most of libertarians as very hostile toward civil liberties.

Senators and members of the House, it turns out, were aware of many of these abuses and never informed people.

Comments (2)

October 12, 2011

So, if it wasn’t Wall Street, then who inflated the US housing bubble anyway?

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: BillClinton, Debt, GeorgeWBush, Housing, Mortgages, Regulation — Nicholas @ 12:03

Peter Wallison has the answer:

Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.

It is certainly possible to find prime borrowers among people with incomes below the median. But when more than half of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie were required to buy were required to have that characteristic, these two government-sponsored enterprises had to significantly reduce their underwriting standards.

Fannie and Freddie were not the only government-backed or government-controlled organizations that were enlisted in this process. The Federal Housing Administration was competing with Fannie and Freddie for the same mortgages. And thanks to rules adopted in 1995 under the Community Reinvestment Act, regulated banks as well as savings and loan associations had to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served.

Comments Off

August 24, 2011

What the US economy really needs

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Congress, Debt, GeorgeWBush, Recession, Stimulus — Nicholas @ 09:22

What it really needs is less interference from the government, which is why Michael Tanner is asking them to stay on vacation:

As the economy continues to teeter on the precipice of a double-dip recession, there is a growing demand for the president and Congress to rush back from their vacations and do something. But why?

What is it that we really think the president can do?

While the president’s latest economic plan remains a deeply held secret until after his vacation, pretty much everyone in Washington expects him to call for . . . drumroll please . . . a stimulus plan.

Now why haven’t we thought of that before? Oh, that’s right. We have.

In fact, we have now had at least five — or is it six? — stimulus plans since this recession started.

Comments Off

August 7, 2011

Mitchell: Obama bears only 15% of the blame for the downgrade

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Debt, FDR, GeorgeWBush, GreatDepression, LBJ, SocialSecurity, Stimulus — Nicholas @ 17:57

In a blog post guaranteed to tick off members of both parties, Daniel Mitchell tries a first approximation of where the blame should be assigned:

Well, it turns out that Social Security is a relatively minor part of the problem, so even though President Roosevelt’s policies exacerbated and extended the Great Depression, the program he created is only responsible for a small share of the fiscal crisis. To give the illusion of scientific exactitude, let’s assign FDR 13.2 percent of the blame.

The health care numbers are much harder to disentangle because it’s not apparent how much of the increase is due to Medicare, Medicaid, Bush’s prescription drug entitlement, and Obamacare. A healthcare policy wonk may know these numbers, but the CBO long-run forecast didn’t provide much detail.

So with a big caveat that these are just wild estimations, I feel reasonably comfortable in saying that both Bush and Obama made matters worse with their reckless entitlement expansions, but that they merely deepened a fiscal hole that was created when President Johnson imposed Medicare and Medicaid.

Comments Off

February 3, 2011

Bipartisan big government

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, BillClinton, Debt, GeorgeWBush, Stimulus — 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.

Comments Off

September 21, 2009

Hate the president: it’s a hallowed tradition

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, BillClinton, FreedomOfSpeech, GeorgeWBush — 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.)

Comments (5)

« Newer Posts