The Democrat Thread

[KipWellsFan]

Bill O'Reilly is f***ing clownshoes. Can we just leave it at that?

Edited April 16, 2010 by KipWellsFan

[bmags]

CNN got overheated with their rhetoric. MSNBC got overheated with their rhetoric. Oh wait, you never hear that from Democrats. That's part of the problem.

 

haha.

[Balta1701]

In case anyone's interested in the view of the Obama NASA plan discussed yesterday, I managed to catch a rant on it from one of the guys who's been working with NASA since Apollo yesterday.

 

When Obama's administration came in and got their hands on the Bush/Constellation program, they did what you might call a routine audit to try to figure out where things were. Brought in some of the top people and asked what their plans are and how they were going to accomplish them. I'm not sure if it was Michael Griffin himself or just one of the guys under him, but they put the simple question to him...how are you going to accomplish the mission plans you've laid out with the funding you have? The next day, after years of working on these mission plans...he came back and said he couldn't come close. That was it for that guy's employment.

 

When they re-did the analysis of the Constellation/moon program, the outlines for getting back to the moon by 2020 were not only heavily underfunded, but also they didn't even have a rational program for the Moon or Mars in place. When we did Apollo, we did 10 years of test-flights to get the technology up to the point that Apollo 11 could happen. The Constellation outline pretty much involved scrapping all of the planning/test phases and just going straight there for both planets. This is of course nonsense; you'll kill people, but it turns out that was the plan the Bush admin was pushing.

 

So, Obama's team is scrapping the 2020 goal for the Constellation program, trying to bring in outside funding if anyone wants to do so privately, putting the normal test flights that you'd require back in for both the Moon and Mars programs, which delays things by a decade since they're not cheap, and in the meantime focusing on Rovers while everything else builds up.

 

Overall, I got the impression that a number of people are angry...because their jobs relied heavily on doing it the Bush way, but the people who don't have a horse in that race are fairly content, because they knew that the Bush method was going to get scrapped eventually because it was so poorly thought out.

[Balta1701]

Demonstrators began gathering early Thursday for speeches at Freedom Plaza. Among them was Jerry Johnson, 58, a lawyer from Berryville, Va., who held a homemade sign depicting the United States as the Titanic striking an iceberg.

 

...

Johnson expressed opposition to Obama. "It's not just because he's black," he said. "I wish I could tell you that I loved this guy, that he was a great president, that I had faith in him. But I have none. Zero."

Oh, so it's not 100% entirely because he's black. Maybe 90%.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Looks like Murdoch is starting to try to pull in Fox News' political activism:

Fox News has pulled Sean Hannity from his starring role in a tea party rally just one week after Rupert Murdoch said the network should not be supporting the tea party movement.

 

Hannity was set to broadcast Thursday night from a tea party rally in Cincinnati, but was rushing back to New York Thursday evening after network executives learned of the plan and said it was unacceptable.

 

"Fox News never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party organizers to use Sean Hannity's television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event," Bill Shine, the network's executive vice president of programming, told the Los Angeles Times. "When senior executives in New York were made aware of this, we changed our plans for tonight's show."

 

As the LAT notes, Hannity was listed as the headline of the Cincinnati rally.

 

"Sean Hannity rushing to NYC, cancelled broadcast from Cincinnati Tea Party. Crowd disappointed," fellow speaker Jonah Goldberg tweeted late Thursday afternoon.

 

Last week, News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch said before a Washington, DC crowd that Fox News should not be supporting the movement.

 

"I don't think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party," he said. Earlier this week, the network published an article to its website that was semi-critical of the tea party.

[BigSqwert]

In case anyone's interested in the view of the Obama NASA plan discussed yesterday, I managed to catch a rant on it from one of the guys who's been working with NASA since Apollo yesterday.

 

When Obama's administration came in and got their hands on the Bush/Constellation program, they did what you might call a routine audit to try to figure out where things were. Brought in some of the top people and asked what their plans are and how they were going to accomplish them. I'm not sure if it was Michael Griffin himself or just one of the guys under him, but they put the simple question to him...how are you going to accomplish the mission plans you've laid out with the funding you have? The next day, after years of working on these mission plans...he came back and said he couldn't come close. That was it for that guy's employment.

 

When they re-did the analysis of the Constellation/moon program, the outlines for getting back to the moon by 2020 were not only heavily underfunded, but also they didn't even have a rational program for the Moon or Mars in place. When we did Apollo, we did 10 years of test-flights to get the technology up to the point that Apollo 11 could happen. The Constellation outline pretty much involved scrapping all of the planning/test phases and just going straight there for both planets. This is of course nonsense; you'll kill people, but it turns out that was the plan the Bush admin was pushing.

 

So, Obama's team is scrapping the 2020 goal for the Constellation program, trying to bring in outside funding if anyone wants to do so privately, putting the normal test flights that you'd require back in for both the Moon and Mars programs, which delays things by a decade since they're not cheap, and in the meantime focusing on Rovers while everything else builds up.

 

Overall, I got the impression that a number of people are angry...because their jobs relied heavily on doing it the Bush way, but the people who don't have a horse in that race are fairly content, because they knew that the Bush method was going to get scrapped eventually because it was so poorly thought out.

 

 

SOCIALISM!!!!

[BigSqwert]

Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them?

 

 

[GoSox05]

Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them?

 

 

This is nothing new, calling people socialist and communist. People in this country have had their lives ruined by these types of allegations. We've jailed people, thrown people out of the country and even killed people because they were supposedly socialist, communist or anarchist.

 

 

[southsider2k5]

This is nothing new, calling people socialist and communist. People in this country have had their lives ruined by these types of allegations. We've jailed people, thrown people out of the country and even killed people because they were supposedly socialist, communist or anarchist.

 

And yet, the left wing has no problem labeling people as racist and the like...

[bmags]

no i don't. Have fun with confederate celebration month.

[kapkomet]

no i don't. Have fun with confederate celebration month.

 

 

You have zero sense of history.

[mr_genius]

confederate celebration month.

 

i didn't even know such a designation existed. that makes me really really non-racist.

[Balta1701]

Friday was clearly the day when the Evil Obama administration decided to use the government to take down all of their honorable enemies.

[Balta1701]

I love educated Senators.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he is going to make “waste, abuse, fraud and inefficiencies” in Medicaid a priority issue and will make sure it gets attention in commission meetings.

 

“Nobody else is going to focus on that,” Coburn said. “Nobody else thinks the $300 billion that we waste every year is important. Over 10 years that’s $3 trillion. So we’re going to look at that aspect of it.”

Medicaid's total cost? ~$333 billion.

[Balta1701]

Did you know that the U.S. gives a tax break to airlines if they collect money as fees rather than as part of the ticket price? They pay a higher tax rate on your ticket price than they do on your $25 bag fee. No wonder they like bag fees so much.

[Balta1701]

Thankfully, these are some of the most powerful people in the country.

During oral arguments today in the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.

 

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

 

Other justices’ questions showed that they probably don’t spend a lot of time texting and tweeting away from their iPhones either.

 

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

 

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

 

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

 

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

 

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

[Balta1701]

The Arizona State House just passed a bill requiring the President to show his birth certificate to that state if he wants to appear on the 2012 ballot.

[Balta1701]

Last week, Sue Lowden, the leading Republican Challenger to Harry Reid in Nevada, earned some deserved scorn for saying that she thought part of the Republican solution to Health Care was to "go ahead and barter with your doctor".

 

Most people laughed at this and thought that she must have meant "Bargain" because, you know, the barter system would be like me bringing in a barrel of coffee beans and offering that up as a price. Not that bargaining with your doctor is good policy anyway, but still, not nearly that ridiculous.

 

Turns out...she meant barter.

"I’m telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I’ll paint your house. I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system."

 

"I'll paint your house for a colonoscopy".

[NorthSideSox72]

The Arizona State House just passed a bill requiring the President to show his birth certificate to that state if he wants to appear on the 2012 ballot.

LOL

 

Buffoons. There were questions about McCain's status as well having been born overseas, but both he and Obama said clearly it was a non-issue. This type of thing is what annoys me about how the Tea Party movement has been co-opted. Its core purpose - to rail against out of control government spending and control - has great merit. Unfortunately for the people who see it that way, they've been conjoined in the "movement" by any and all people whose hatred of Obama goes beyond the bound of reality, and right into cartoonish idiocy.

 

[HuskyCaucasian]

This is Onion quality stuff:

Palin: "Obama's handeling of icelandic volcano helps the terrorist"

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a speech to the national convention of tea-party lawyer's Sarah Palin criticized Obama for his handling of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull. She also suggested that volcano's if they found there way into the hands of terrorist or rouge states could be s serious national security issue.

 

Palin suggested in a Q&A session that President Obama isn't doing enough to stop the Icelandic Volcano from disrupting European air travel. When asked about the situation in Europe the former governor replied: "Say he decided to use force on Eyjafjallajokull or decided really to come out and do whatever he could to support Air travel, which I would like him to do,"

 

When asked if Volcano's could form a threat to the united states she implied Obama's handling of the matter might just make things worse: "He hasn't come right out and threatened violence on Eyjafjallajokull. Who calls a shot like that? Who makes a decision like that? It's a disturbing trend."

 

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in her Q&A session came when she suggested failed states might weaponize volcano's: "What if Ahmadinejad obtains one of these monsters? That could be a serious threat, one which Obama has said nothing about.".

 

While knowledgeable experts and geologist laughed at the claims made by the former Governor, an unnamed source at the American Enterprise institute stated: "Several African nations have been connected to sales of weapons grade magma to both Iran and North Korea." He then added: "It's a real threat. If they manage to get a volcano, and then a fitting wind towards the West, we might all end up stuck on beaches coming summer, unable to return from our vacation destinations."

 

Finally Palin suggested she might be better equipped to handle a volcano then the president: "As Ash Clouds rear there heads and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border."

[Soxy]

Thankfully, these are some of the most powerful people in the country.

That was so great it! Until I checked the link I was expecting it to be The Onion.

[Rex Kickass]

So Charlie Crist is going to abandon the GOP primary for Senate in Florida after polls show him turning a 25 point lead into a 25 point deficit in Florida's open Senate seat race.

 

With the GOP all but abandoning him in the last two weeks, rumor is he's going to run as an independent. He has to make an announcement by April 30 according to Florida law.

 

Best part about this for Dems? It's entirely unclear who he would caucus with once elected, and the GOP frontrunner, Marco Rubio? Now under FBI investigation to see if he was using his party AMEX fraudulently while working in state government. Although I like Kendrick Meeks (what little I know about him), I would love to see a situation where the GOP's extreme wings pushed out another moderate in their party for the benefits of a damaged, and ideologically pure candidate who'll just damage their party further.

[Balta1701]

So Charlie Crist is going to abandon the GOP primary for Senate in Florida after polls show him turning a 25 point lead into a 25 point deficit in Florida's open Senate seat race.

Is that official?

[Rex Kickass]

Is that official?

Not yet, but when your co-chairs are dropping out of the campaign and pulling your endorsement (I.E. Connie Mack), its pretty obvious. That plus if you look at his website, its getting really hard to find the word Republican these days.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

Not yet, but when your co-chairs are dropping out of the campaign and pulling your endorsement (I.E. Connie Mack), its pretty obvious. That plus if you look at his website, its getting really hard to find the word Republican these days.

 

He's not going to win the GOP nomination, that's become clear. So if he wants to run for re-election he has no choice but to run as an I. It's not official but I'd say it's pretty much accepted thats whats happening.