Friday News Roundup - Hour 1
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-04-22/friday-news-roundup-hour-1
The U. S. receives a warning about its credit rating. President Obama takes his deficit plan on the road. And more bad news for air traffic controllers after a near mishap with the First Lady’s plane. A panel of journalists joins Diane for analysis of the week's top national news stories.
Guests
Clarence Page
syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
Susan Davis
congressional correspondent, National Journal.
Byron York
chief political correspondent, Washington Examiner.
News Roundup Video
A caller who works as an air traffic controller explains his opinion that President Ronald Reagan's policies contributed to the recent problems with air traffic controllers falling asleep:
Comments
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Etaoin Shrdlu wrote: (and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote ...)
This isn't going to take long.
"We’ve had social programs in this country from the beginning."
Really? Name one. Go on, you said from the "beginning". I don't want to take you out of context. Name one before 1780. OK,before 1790. OK, 1800. The fact is, there weren't any "from the beginning" There were "alms houses" and voluntary assistance from the public. But there weren't gov't sponsored "social programs" for which the government had to use tax money ... and the FEDERAL gov't, the worst offender today, didn't have ANY such program until FDR.
I have struggled to figure out what it is about your posts that rankles me. It isn't the content, because there isn't much of it. It's not the hypocrisy, though there's plenty of that. It's the intellectual dishonesty.
You complain that if every single point of every post is not addressed by a responder, you're being "taken out of context". Yet you feel free to extrapolate others' posts well beyond the post ... "was there an active spontaneous uprising in Iraq " - I thought it was a "spontaneous uprising"? now it has to be an "active spontaneous uprising?" "Wrong question, but a revealing way to put it. Why not try some classics instead?"
When others take jabs at things you've said, it's "childish" or a "cheap shot". Yet your posts are littered with snide remarks. "My position is simple (so simple you can’t understand it).","When you decide to be more grown up", "Well, you’ve found a slight mistake on my part and, AS USUAL, focus on it and ignore everything else." , "Hiding behind the UN are we?", "Of course, you ONCE AGAIN side-step the critical issue"
I've met a lot of intellectually dishonest hypocrites on a lot of message boards, but you are easily the worst. Now the rest of the participants know it too.
Next comes one of your predictable responses ... "you did it first! WAAAHHH!!!" or "you can't take a joke". Spare us.
jbharuch wrote:@ 11am on 4-22
"'Diane, I don't think that any term other than Class Warfare accurately describes what has been happening during the last twenty years. Income for the upper portion of the population has soared, while those for the lower and shrinking middle classes have remained flat"
What are you smoking jbharuch? The rich been paying most of the tax bill when you include federal, states, local, etc.
We have more cash going out to the population than what is coming in
I still can't reconcile the comments by those who say the deficits went down under George Bush until 2006. Even in this broadcast it was stated again yet when I look at the official government debt during those years online, I see just the opposite (both in absolute terms as well as a % of GDP) as follows:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_debt_to_GDP_-_2000_to_2010.png
What am I missing?
Etaoin:
The reason Bush l did not intervene when the Shi'a uprisiing took place was because when the ceasing of hostilies took place, an agreement was made between the American Generals and Iraqi Generals of a no fly zone that did not include Kurdistan and the Shia area bordering Iran.
Bush l honored that. We would have gone back on our word to have assited those tribes.
mchauan stated 4-22-10@6:34
I was a Teaching Assistant at an elite University just down the road from the Bush Family's Yale and my Students, with whom I sometimes fraternized, were exactly George W.'s (The Runt) Age.
Two, in particular, didn't seem to get very excited about much until the subject of Social Security came up and Boy, they went berserk! I knew Social Security had been strongly resisted by some at the time it was enacted, but I assumed that they would have gotten over it by then.
When I tried to explain how hard it had been for my Father to save for his Retirement and how hard his life had been, my Rich Boy Students, who had never worked a Day in their lives, nor wanted for anything, came perilously close to disrespecting my beloved Dad and pissing me off.
mchauan
For every sad story there are many positive ones. My father had nothing when he came to this country and no there was no tax payer assitance. He bleed, sweet, and saved. Yea you can say I was like one of Bush's rich friends. Dad told me I did not need to work another day in my life.
But you know something I paid for it. Emotional pain due to not knowing what to do with my life. No incentive to work. So the next time you start critizicing somebody of a different economics level, start looking to what is happening behind close doors. It is not everything you think. It took me 30yrs of hard knocks to accompish where I am at.
We have become a society thats dependant on Goverment handouts and the Democratic politicans that are the enablers.
Dad became a Republican in 1968 after he saw all the give away program from the The Great Society and saw how these programs would ruin hard working Americans. He was right. We have more poverty now than in 1966.
Making a connection between a controller falling asleep in 2011 and past presidents is absurd. When an employee falls asleep on the job it represents a failure of the individual to remain alert and a failure of (current) management to allow these events to take place. From my perspective this reflects on existing FAA management and their boss (the current administration). Blaming anyone else is ridiculous. Harry Truman would have known this.
Etaoin Shrdlu wrote:
"Actually, I believe I first made that claim in a post to a Diane Rhem show where the conservatives outnumbered the liberals. But, since my point is that the whole exercise is a silly one, and I don’t have the time to go look for it right now, I’ll decline your invitation to repeat myself."
So you had another false memory. OK. Obviously, there has never been a DR Show, or any show on NPR, where conservative guests outnumbered the liberals and the liberal host. That just isn''t NPR's schtick. You may characterize this as a "silly exercise." but the amount of calories consumed by your lack of searching for any example(s) may not have contributed to your adiposty, it certainly hasn't detracted from it.
After listening to sleeping traffic controller segment with the usual "it is the republican's fault" and we need more federal employees from the union guy, you failed to ask the real question. Why are we paying ~$125,000 per year and now a quarter of a million dollars a year for two air traffic controllers to suppport an airport that has only several planes landing in the late night shift? Do not get me wrong. I have the utmost repect for their dedication, high pressure efforts and their contribution to the general safety of 10,000's of people that travel every day. Someone is scheduling a very expensive, wasteful use of my tax dollars.