The Fallacious Arguments of the Republicans

noticed that on the Sunday morning talk shows, Newt Gingrich was on CBS talking about how the Supreme Court decision to maintain our constitution and the right to habeas corpus will cause one of our major cities to be destroyed by a nuke (more or less)...and on ABC, Fred Thompson was talking against Obama's policy of increasing the taxes on the super-rich while lowering taxes on the lower and middle classes...saying that McCain's tax policy will build our economy...okay...let's look at that one (neither interviewer questioned the validity of either Newt's or Fred's statements...just acted like these were the most knowledgeable guys in the world...blech)...Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have presided over administrations which have given us over 90% of the national debt we have...taken us from a net investor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world...plus...our balance of trade is in the tank to the tune of 60 billion dollars per month...that's 700 billion plus dollars per year that we are importing more than we are exporting... The argument that our unemployment rate is low (even though it jumped a half percent this past quarter)...is also fallacious. The way unemployment is calculated is skewed in favour of the administration, and only counts people who are drawing unemployment...(perhaps one reason the Republicans are against extending unemployment benefits for the hardest hit...it will increase the percentage unemployed because those whose benefits would have ended will still be on the rolls...) The small government, balanced budget, conservatives...(all terms are said with my tongue firmly in my cheek)...are the ones who have ballooned government (Homeland Security, anyone) incompetently, never submit a balanced budget (even when they controlled both houses of congress and the white house the budget was massively imbalanced)...and conservative...choke...shred the constitution...and then lambaste the Supreme Court for actually restoring habeas corpus by the very thinnest of margins...one vote... We are one vote away from fascism...one supreme court justice away from fascism... We need to get this message out to the workers of this country...the middle class which is being decimated while corporate oil companies are given tax subsidies and have record 45 billion dollar profits...with oil men in the white house...Bush/Cheney...and all through the administration...with lobbyists and destroyers of our economy (Phil Gramm is McCain's 'economic advisor') running the McCain campaign and situated to further damage our economy, the dollar and our prestige in the world community...not to mention placing all our liberties at risk. If you can get your hands on the current issue (July/August 2008) of Mother Jones read "Who Wrecked the Economy?"...and why they work for John McCain. On Phil Gramm: Phil Gramm is, perhaps, one of the most shifty figures in modern Washington history. In 1978, he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat from Texas. In 1981, Gramm betrayed the caucus that spent hundreds of thousands to elect him by attending Democratic budget meetings and passing along strategy memos to Republicans. He is oft cited as the figure most responsible for handing Reagan his massive tax cuts. When, in 1982, the Democrats stripped him of his committee seat, Gramm resigned from the House and won the seat again in a special election, this time as a Republican. Gramm was elected to the Senate in 1984, proving that Texas isn't a state where common sense and decency reign supreme. Moreover, in his time in the Senate, he was the author of the Financial Services Modernization Act, the bill which paved the way for the mortgage crisis. From Mother Jones: "In 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania" You can read more about the bill at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Gramm received over $1 million from the securities and financial sector for his dutiful contributions to this industry's profits. Gramm's wife, who had sat on the board of the Commodity Trading Futures Commission, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. That rule was due to be overturned. In his third, and thankfully final, term in the Senate, Gramm was the author of another bill called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This bill featured the now-infamous "Enron loophole", which allowed the energy company to be exempt from keeping detailed records on over-the-counter energy and commodity trades. Without a doubt, the CFMA codified the conditions into law that were needed for Enron to pull off one of the grandest corporate swindles in American history. It was later revealed that Gramm had received the language for the loophole directly from Enron lobbyists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000 From Mother Jones, again: "But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed." Anyone who argues that complete de-regulation of an industry, where there is so much money involved, is a good thing simply does not understand how economics works. Now, and only now, has the federal government decided to step into the crisis, by using taxpayer dollars --that's right, the money that Republicans so often say needs to be dealt with responsibly -- to bail out corporate banks that got in way over their heads. In 2003, Gramm left the Senate, to give current Texas Senator John Cornyn seniority over the rest of the class. Because he had been such a friend to the industry, mega-bank UBS hired Gramm to serve them as a lobbyist. His role: lobby Congress, the White House and the Federal Reserve on issues of credit industry regulation. Let me repeat that: After a career of taking money from the financial services, writing the bills that the UBS board members dreamt of at night and having them signed into law, Gramm became a highly-paid lobbyist whose job it was to get more deregulation, less oversight. From the Politico: "According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006. During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages. For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary." (I apologise for any attributions I may have failed to make)