[LOL] Probable Bush press secretary on Bush

bigtexxx · Apr 25, 2006

glynch said:

Then just a post or two later.

Bigtexx can't help it. He is an innocent in a way. like that other biz school grad his hero, The Decider, he makes these statements, yet sees no contradictions.
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lol, glynch. Once again you're blinded by your extreme bias. Glynch, I said I consider facts. The sites that I mentioned are biased. They inject their opinions and those same biases enter into their articles. I would think you and the elite lawyer crowd that you run with would understand that.

wizkid83 · Apr 25, 2006

Just a slight derail comment, is it possible to debate on the internet without using the word "pwnage"?

SamFisher · Apr 25, 2006

wizkid83 said:

Just a slight derail comment, is it possible to debate on the internet without using the word "pwnage"?
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NOT.

PWNED.

bigtexxx said:

Attention liberals: Just so you are aware in advance, I will not click on your links to the following sites: commondreams dot org, thinkprogress, dailykos, the Guardian, the NY Times, huffington post, moveon dot org or crooksandliars. I reserve the right to made additions to this list in the future. If you would like to convince the board about your point of view, please begin with a source other than the above. THANKS IN ADVANCE
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LOLLABUNGA.

I will do the honors with SECOND OWNAGE.

Please note, that as indicated above, many of these quotes are from the DETROIT NEWS, apparently a publication of some sort for which Snow writes:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache...nt.&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2&client=firefox-a

Politics

Bush leads country on spending spree

President urges restraint but approves new expenses

By Tony Snow

Presidential budget records compared

President Bush

President George W. Bush has seen government spending increase a projected 30 percent in his first three years in office. He has not vetoed a spending bill. He has signed large increases in defense, education, agricultural and Medicare spending.

President Reagan

Ronald Reagan, 1981-89, reduced spending growth in his first year in office. He occasionally criticized the congressional spending process. But over his eight years, he increased spending 68 percent.

President Clinton

Bill Clinton, 1993-2001, saw federal spending rise 3.5 percent in his first three years in office. He ran surpluses in two of his eight years in office.

When it comes to federal spending, George W. Bush is the boy who can’t say no.

In each of his three years at the helm, the president has warned Congress to restrain its spending appetites, but so far nobody has pushed away from the table — mainly because the president doesn’t seem to mean what he says.

He hasn’t vetoed a single bill and hasn’t issued one veto threat of sufficient menace to cause pause to anybody on Capitol Hill.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, who defined his presidency by means of large, concrete goals — curbing spending growth, cutting taxes and defeating the communists — President Bush governs according to a gauzy slogan, “compassionate conservatism.” He has never defined the term, mainly because it is more a pose than a promise — a rhetorical attempt to answer the old Democratic charge that Republicans love the rich and hate the poor.

Even his most specific early goal, holding spending growth to 4 percent a year, came festooned with an escape clause: The president would renounce fiscal discipline in the event of an economic downturn, a national emergency or a war.

As it turns out, he got all three. Vice President Dick Cheney declared a month before the Bush inaugural that the economy was heading into the tank, clearing the way for using the economic downturn portion of the escape clause. The September 11 attacks then wiped out nearly a trillion dollars in wealth while pushing the nation into a war on terror that began in Afghanistan and will end at a place and time yet unknown.

By the time the books close on the first three years of this presidency, federal spending will have increased by more than 30 percent, with the biggest explosions yet to come. While defense spending has boomed, so has nondefense.

Cabinet departments targeted for elimination when Newt Gingrich’s Brigades marched on Washington in 1995 — the departments of Labor and Education — have seen three-year budget increases of 65 and 70 percent, respectively.

The Department of Agriculture, bound and gagged during the years of Bill Clinton, this year reaped an astonishing windfall. After the president drew a line in the sand over the expense of a proposed farm bill, House-Senate honorables added nearly $10 billion to the package, which the chief executive duly signed.

These hikes will look like small potatoes in two years, when Americans get their first taste of Medicare reforms also signed recently by the president. (The legislation conveniently won’t kick in until after the next round of elections and swearings-in.)

The Congressional Budget Office has slapped a $400 billion price tag on the first decade of the program, but that’s probably a low estimate. When Congress created Medicare in 1966, it laid out a projection that was 725 percent short of the actual cost. Perhaps hedging its bets, the CBO last week pegged the second decade’s cost of “reform” at $2 trillion.

Compare and contrast George W. Bush’s fiscal record with that of Bill Clinton. Total spending in Clinton’s first three years grew a total of 3.5 percent, and nondefense spending actually fell. Three major factors explain the discrepancy between presidents.

First, Clinton had to negotiate mostly with a Republican Congress, led by the energized and idealistic disciples of House Speaker Gingrich. Republicans forced him to adopt a series of bills for which he later took credit (such as welfare reform), while crushing his attempt to erect a national health care system.

Bush, in contrast, has been forced to purchase congressional support for his key priorities — the Patriot Act, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a global assault on the terror network. Along the way, he has tried to replicate his Texas experience by making nice with Democratic leaders. For example, he shredded his own educational proposal to produce one amenable to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who expressed his gratitude by vowing revenge against the president for everything from judicial picks to the success against Saddam Hussein. The president now surely knows he’s not in Austin anymore.

The Bush and Clinton experiences illustrate the power of a generally unified opposition: When Democratic presidents have to horse trade with a Republican Congress, spending falls. The opposite happens when a Republican president has to haggle with Democrats.

Human nature provides a second explanation of the spending spree. Politicians, regardless of party, celebrate power by using the budget as a re-election war chest. Republicans are doling out money furiously, hoping to reward friends and cement their hold on office.

But they’re not fools: They’re selling everything, including carnival rides, as contributions to the war on bin Laden.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., recently quipped that his colleagues are spending like drunken sailors. But drunken sailors, unlike members of Congress, can’t print more money when the barkeep presents the tab.

Citizens Against Government Waste, a think tank that advocates limited and parsimonious government, says the number of pork-barrel projects stuffed into federal budgets has increased to 9,362 this year from 958 in 1996 (the year of Clinton’s second election campaign). Even granting the subjectivity of the group’s standard, it’s pretty obvious the Bush era has become a golden age of profligacy.

Finally, the president doesn’t seem to give a rip about spending restraint. He hasn’t devoted a single major speech to the topic or engaged in the sort of theatrics Reagan used in his 1988 State of the Union Address — hoisting a last-minute omnibus budget bill larded with costly compromises and decreeing that he would never accept such a thing again.

The so-called continuing budget resolution promptly vanished from the scene — until now. George W. Bush infuriates budget hawks because his conservatism is thematic rather than programmatic. He wants to revitalize core virtues and values, using his faith as a beacon. He advocates reaching out to all God’s children and sees federal spending not as pork, but salve — as a way of lowering suspicions and sapping enmity.

The entire enterprise has a defensive ring to it, as if the president fears his party has been flint-hearted over the years and needs to make public amends. This may explain why Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., defended Medicare reform as an effort to take an issue “off the table.”

In other words, the GOP sacrificed budgetary principle for political expediency. Yet, every president eventually learns that short-term political calculations often make possible future catastrophe. George W. Bush’s refusal to grapple with government’s proper size and role virtually guarantees that class warfare will become an even more prominent feature of American politics.

The tax code cleaves the nation into two classes of nearly equal size: Those who pay and those who don’t. The top 50 percent pay 96.1 percent of all federal income taxes. The federal budget costs $20,000 per person annually, according to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, and the cost could double in five years.

You’d be hard pressed to find many people who believe they’re getting their money’s worth, which means the public will grow more suspicious of government and class warriors will urge one and all to soak the rich. (Beware: If you’re reading this, you probably have been classified as “rich” by those who believe in raising taxes.)

But then, every president has to make choices. Bush has staked his presidency almost exclusively on the war against terror. That decision has made him the most consequential president since Franklin Roosevelt. However, it also means someone else eventually will have to clean up the spending messes left behind by a president who, when politicians came begging for more loot, just couldn’t say no.

Tony Snow is a former Detroit News editorial writer. He hosts “Weekend Live with Tony Snow” on the Fox News Channel.
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bigtexxx · Apr 25, 2006

SamFisher said:

NOT.

PWNED.

LOLLABUNGA.

I will do the honors with SECOND OWNAGE.

Please note, that as indicated above, many of these quotes are from the DETROIT NEWS, apparently a publication of some sort for which Snow writes:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache...nt.&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2&client=firefox-a
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SamFisher, what on earth are you doing/talking about? I have not requested further articles about Tony Snow and his comments. Your posting of additional articles, while amusing due to the amount of time you wasted looking for them, is not something that I have requested.

SamFisher · Apr 25, 2006

bigtexxx said:

I hath been double PWNED under GAPP (Generally Accepted PWNAGE Principles)
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Indeed. Two thumbs up.

mc mark · Apr 25, 2006

It's a done deal! Announcement in the morning.

rimrocker · Apr 25, 2006

bigtexxx said:

Attention liberals: Just so you are aware in advance, I will not click on your links to the following sites: commondreams dot org, thinkprogress, dailykos, the Guardian, the NY Times, huffington post, moveon dot org or crooksandliars. I reserve the right to made additions to this list in the future. If you would like to convince the board about your point of view, please begin with a source other than the above. THANKS IN ADVANCE
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See, here's the difference... all those sites you mentioned may... may slant the interpretation of facts towards one side, but they all reference original source material, particularly C&L, who mainly just post video clips of stupid conservatives. The Right, on the other hand, just makes junk up and tries to make it true by repeating it over and over or appealing to the authority of some English Lord.

If you have a question about stuff, follow the links to the original source and then make a decision.

bnb · Apr 25, 2006

I think texx is just afraid of leaving an internet trail.

The p*rn, strip clubs, and boy band sites he can explain...but he's just not ready to justify visiting commondreams dot org.

In fact, the whole dot org neighbourhood kind of freaks him out.

Sishir Chang · Apr 25, 2006

wizkid83 said:

Just a slight derail comment, is it possible to debate on the internet without using the word "pwnage"?
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Boy I wish it were so.

mc mark · Apr 26, 2006

Whitehouse to announce new press secretary this morning!

Is this a new hire or just an interdepartmental transfer?

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