We need an organized approach to hold our representatives accountable. “Shame is a powerful tool.”

How does it stack up against “withering contempt” and “unbridled fury”?

Coburn, Worst Waste of the Year

unclesmrgol on December 12, 2008 at 12:39 PM

Well, I hope you enjoy people passing you. Especially when it’s folks with V6 Mustangs, recent Grand Prix’s, multitudes of Cobalts, and base 300M’s passing you by. An old Dodge slogan comes to mind – except your only choices are follow or get out of the way.

Maybe you should have been wiser to accept a car not on the end of an assembly line. Rejected a 1999 Astro that was and it’s replacement served faithfully ever since.

Entelechy on December 12, 2008 at 12:12 PM

Trying to get all your cheap shots in before Reaganism gets thrown out?

Coburn is a man who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Earlier today Sen. Tom Coburn spoke to a blogger conference call in connection with the release of his 2008: Worst Waste of the Year” report. It was a wide-ranging, on-the-record discussion. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a good synopsis. Toward the end …

Based upon falling revenues and increased financial stimulus and bailout spending by Washington, Senator Tom Coburn predicted America will see a 1.6 Trillion dollar budget shortfall next year. Ed at Hot Air has some details from the call: Noel Sheppard…

Coburn says that the White House signal to give the money from TARP is a “big mistake”. It will lead to requests from every failing private enterprise to get rescued by the Treasury. Going down that road would be a “giant mistake”. The TARP funds were intended to unlock the credit markets, not to provide government rescues for failing private businesses.

Those credit markets were private businesses too. There’s a bit of a disconnect in Coburn’s thinking here. In the end the target of any act by the Government has to be the continued well being of the “people on Main Street” as the candidates so adroitly put it.

Even Coburn would have given the money to the automakers if the UAW had signed on.

What is going on here is merely the nature of the medicine and who’s allowed to swallow it and in what doses. We expect the medicine to taste bitter, and when the UAW wants sugar in theirs, they can’t expect the rest of us to provide it.

I factory-ordered a car, and a UAW strike idled that car on the assembly line for six weeks, and when I got the car, it spent 90 days of its first year in the shop, and was missing parts essential to its safe operation. The UAW earned my undying enmity from that incident and I’ve never bought an American car since [I love my Hiroshima-built Mazda 3 -- it's the best car I've ever owned.]

Again, the UAW can stuff it where the sun don’t shine as far as I’m concerned.

Coburn sees a intestinal deficit among some Republicans.

And that’s why they are in the minority. They feathered their own nests.

People have to get involved. They have to start taking risks to get the government they want and to hold it accountable. We need an organized approach to hold our representatives accountable. “Shame is a powerful tool.”

Yea. Just ask Joe the Plumber and Bristol.

;-(

May the Blago clusterfark and the big-3 ‘bailout’ destroy the unions for good. They had a place, in 1800, but not in this global economy.

The political fallout might hurt those who claim to be “for the people” but to hell with them. They just like to keep their sheeple in a modern day serfdom, for power.

No company can remain competitive with the union set up of today. It’s simply a 21st century reality. The markets might work, after all, give it a year.

GWB, Foxtrott Yankee. I always wanted to say that to a president, while I still am free to do so. This is an applicable moment.

RiteWingFascist on December 12, 2008 at 12:05 PM

Voting for the TARP is gonna be the Dems version of “did you vote for Iraq?”

jeff_from_mpls on December 12, 2008 at 11:58 AM

+1

I like to think (Dream) that someday we could send a similar statesman from Minnesota. One who seeks the common good, not just reelection. Instead we nearly sent Franken this cycle. One of the all time great cartoonists said “We have met the enemy and his is us”

We could say they spend money like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair – to drunken sailors. It would be unfair, because the sailors are spending their own money.

‐ Ronald Reagan on Congress

To me that says a lot.