This is why you don't believe right wing rag publications.

[Lucky... 0]

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9880

What banished high unemployment was the conscription of 12 million men into the armed forces during World War II.

The draft wasn't until late 1940.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment

24.9 to 14.6 by 1940. Then war preparations, manufacturing, etc employed a lot of people. But to say a lot of good hadn't been done absent the draft is purely propaganda.

...he tripled taxes...

The Revenue Act of 1932 was signed into law by Hoover 9 months before his term ended.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1932

The Revenue Act of 1932 (June 6, 1932, ch. 209, 47 Stat. 169) raised United States tax rates across the board, with the rate on top incomes rising from 25 percent to 63 percent. The estate tax was doubled and corporate taxes were raised by almost 15 percent.

Actually 24% to 63%, but same thing. FDR didn't raise taxes until 1935-36 and then it wasn't as great as Hoover did, 260%, in 1932. I think it wa steh right thing to do by both, but see how the Cato rag blatantly lies?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1936

His top tax rate at the peak of the war was 94% from 63% as Hoover did, a 260% increase. 63% to 94% is a 49% increase over a little more than 12 years, hardly triple.

One of Harding's campaign slogans was "less government in business," and it served him well. Harding embraced the advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and called for tax cuts in his first message to Congress on April 12, 1921. The highest taxes, on corporate revenues and "excess" profits, were to be cut. Personal income taxes were to be left as is, with a top rate of 8 percent of incomes above $4,000. Harding recognized the crucial importance of encouraging the investment that is essential for growth and jobs, something that FDR never did.

Harding was the first neo-con. His corporate-love and disconcern for the citizen distanced him from Great Republican Presidents like Teddy Roosvelt, just 12 years prior. Harding's neo-con policies seemed great at the time, but his pseudo growth and prosperity was generally only felt by the filthy rich and was short-lived.

Powerful senators, however, favored giving bonuses to veterans, as 38 states had done. But such spending increases would have put upward pressure on taxes. On July 12, 1921, Harding went to the Senate and urged tax and spending cuts. He noted that a half-billion dollars in compensation and insurance claims were already being paid to 813,442 veterans, and 107,824 veterans were enrolled in government-sponsored vocational training programs.

Current neo-cons in here, this is where the disdain for military personnel started under the guise of patriotism. I hope we get to learn of the Bonus Army and Hoover's response.

In 1922, the House passed a veterans' bonus bill 333-70, without saying how the bonuses would be funded. The senate passed it 35-17. Despite intense lobbying from the American Legion, Harding vetoed the bill on September 19— just six weeks before congressional elections, when presidents generally throw goodies at voters. Harding said it was unfair to add to the burdens of 110 million taxpayers.

Right, fuck the vets. When will all neo-cons learn that the Republicna Party isn;t for current or former military personnel?

Conspicuously absent was the business-bashing that became a hallmark of FDR's speeches. Absent, too, were New Deal-type big government programs to make it more expensive for employers to hire people, to force prices above market levels, or to promote cartels and monopolies.

Absent were worker's rights.

The Roaring Twenties were a time of unprecedented prosperity.

I would say the 1990's were better, esp considering GWHB/Clinton inherited a total turd, the 1921 economics weren't nearly as bad, the debt wasn't soaring, etc.

There was a dramatic expansion of the middle class.

You mean the upper class.

Women had the vote.

The 19th Amendment was passed on August 26, 1920 while Wilson was in office. See how they act as if that was a Republican thing? Patently dishonest.

Unfortunately, Harding's stunning success as a depression fighter was overshadowed by the Teapot Dome scandal that engulfed his administration after his death in August 1923.

Yea, pitty, Harding was discovered as one of the most dishonest/corrupt presidents in history after his death. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome

BTW, that land was reconfigured back to the US Gov in a 1927 SCOTUS decision after a bunch of kick-backs via Harding and his cabinet.

Since the beginnings of recorded history, government involvement in the economy has led to corruption, and Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted bribes for leases enabling private companies to extract the oil.

Right, after Harding set them aside and allowed lease w/o bidding which led to kick-backs. Good thing we have honest corporations like Enron and all the other corrupt mortgage, etc corps to keep the gov straight.

There wouldn't have been a scandal if the reserves had been privatized, as more than 250 million acres of government land had been privatized during the previous century.

Right, private corporations play by the rules and never go corrupt.

Rather than follow the model of FDR— whose policies raised only Americans' spirits— President-Elect Obama ought to consider the model of Warren G. Harding, whose policies raised Americans' standard of living, and lifted the nation itself out of a depression— before it had a chance to become Great.

Yea, it was Hoover's tax increases first of all, and it was FDR's implementation of social programs (esp organized labor rights) that raised the standard of living of MC people. The 1920's were FAR better for rich people than they were for the poor.

That's only an overview of that BS article. At least they should get the basic facts straight, rather than claim FDR tripled taxes. That's such an easy kill that it's beyond comprehension that they would try to sell it to anyone.

[justinb138 0]

This is why you don't trust politicians, especially when it comes to economics.

[Lucky... 0]

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This is why you don't trust politicians, especially when it comes to economics.

I didn't see any R's named on that link. S it's dishonest too.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/09/update-fannie-mae-and-freddie.html

There's a list of all recipients of Freddie/Fannie money; seems like a fair amount of both parties and Indep.

So is it fair to say the link you provided is as honest as The Cato Institute?

Anyway, the thread title was that RW rags are often blatantly dishonest, not one of, 'are politicians honest?' So that wasn't my point, my point is how blatantly dishonest so many RW rags are.

[airdvr 210]

You mean like The Onion?

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[Lucky... 0]

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You mean like The Onion?

No, more like Cato and the Heritage Foundation so many of the neo's like to cite.

So apparently you agree then, these RW rags are often BS.

[SpeedRacer 1]

Why do you keep calling them "neo-cons?"

The particular policies you cite were not specific to neo-conservatism.

Neo-conservatism refers specifically to a movement that focuses on greater foreign interventionism & military domination of the planet by the USA.

The people you keep referring to are if anything more like American paleo-conservatives than neo-conservatives.

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[justinb138 0]

It's video of Chris Dodd himself, not sure how even you can attempt to spin that as dishonest.

Or are you implying that the Cato Institute superimposed Chris Dodd into a video telling everyone that Freddie and Fannie were financially sound as late as 2008 and somehow managed to get it on television with no one, including Chris Dodd, noticing?

[mnealtx 0]

Given the (very) LW rag in your sigline (I'm sure that your posts in all the other forums HAVE been deleted per moderation policy, right?), you're hardly an objective observer.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[SpeedRacer 1]

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Harding was the first neo-con. His corporate-love and disconcern for the citizen distanced him from Great Republican Presidents like Teddy Roosvelt, just 12 years prior. Harding's neo-con policies seemed great at the time, but his pseudo growth and prosperity was generally only felt by the filthy rich and was short-lived.

Harding was NOT a Neo-Conservative by any stretch of the imagination. He believed in the USA NOT joining the League of Nations, and generally advocated a policy of America not getting involved with problems of foreign nations.

That is the complete OPPOSITE of Neo-conservatism.

He was still a conservative, just of a different type.

Speed Racer
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[Lucky... 0]

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It's video of Chris Dodd himself, not sure how even you can attempt to spin that as dishonest.

Or are you implying that the Cato Institute superimposed Chris Dodd into a video telling everyone that Freddie and Fannie were financially sound as late as 2008 and somehow managed to get it on television with no one, including Chris Dodd, noticing?

No, the video infers it all Dems taking Freddie and Fannie money. That's dishonest.

[Lucky... 0]

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Given the (very) LW rag in your sigline (I'm sure that your posts in all the other forums HAVE been deleted per moderation policy, right?), you're hardly an objective observer.

Mine is posted for parody, not delivered as fact; there's a difference. The Cato, Heritage are rags that try to pass off as legitimate.

[justinb138 0]

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It's video of Chris Dodd himself, not sure how even you can attempt to spin that as dishonest.

Or are you implying that the Cato Institute superimposed Chris Dodd into a video telling everyone that Freddie and Fannie were financially sound as late as 2008 and somehow managed to get it on television with no one, including Chris Dodd, noticing?

No, the video infers it all Dems taking Freddie and Fannie money. That's dishonest.

It's not inferring anything, it's simply a confirmation that politicians don't know shit when it comes to economics.

[justinb138 0]

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So is it fair to say the link you provided is as honest as The Cato Institute?

If you're going to quote Wikipedia as something you consider an honest source:

Quote

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

The Cato Institute is non-partisan, and its scholars' views are not consistently aligned with either major political party. For example, Cato scholars were sharply critical of the second Bush administration (2001 - 2009) on a wide variety of issues, including the Iraq war, civil liberties, education, health care, agriculture, energy policy, and excessive government spending. However, on other issues, most notably Social Security,[1][2] global warming,[3][4] tax policy,[5] and immigration,[6][7][8][9][10] Cato scholars had praised Bush administration initiatives. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Cato scholars criticized both major-party candidates, John McCain[11][12] and Barack Obama.[13][14]

If you believe wikipedia is accurate, either your basing your original statements on good data and you're wrong about the Cato institute being partisan, or you're basing your statements on bad data and you're right about the Cato institute.

Which is it?

[quade 4]

The problem is one of history itself. Really if you think about it the first "neoconservative" the one that actually embraced the term was Irving Kristol in 1979, but it had a pretty different meaning by the time his son, William Kristol founded the PNAC in 1997. In that time the term has gone from meaning social democracy to this bizarre binary polarization of only seeing issues in terms of black and white in the foreground while manipulating world events for profit in the background.

On the whole, I don't think the far end of the right wing has ever been very good at coming up with great names for things. My guess is they're so afraid of "liberal" ideas, they don't have anybody on staff with a liberal arts degree. Instead, they have a tendency to latch on to old names and twist the hell out of them making them virtually unrecognizable from the original intent. Well, at least the names of the things that want to keep in the (mostly) uneducated public eye. When they want to set up lobbying groups and internal working groups, they actually are pretty good at picking names that hide what's really going on.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[SpeedRacer 1]

Lucky clearly does not understand the difference between Neo-conservatism and Paleo- (or traditional) conservatism.


The Cato institute clearly leans more towards the Paleo-conservative.

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[Lucky... 0]

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Harding was the first neo-con. His corporate-love and disconcern for the citizen distanced him from Great Republican Presidents like Teddy Roosvelt, just 12 years prior. Harding's neo-con policies seemed great at the time, but his pseudo growth and prosperity was generally only felt by the filthy rich and was short-lived.

Harding was NOT a Neo-Conservative by any stretch of the imagination. He believed in the USA NOT joining the League of Nations, and generally advocated a policy of America not getting involved with problems of foreign nations.

That is the complete OPPOSITE of Neo-conservatism.

He was still a conservative, just of a different type.

It looks like your mostly right, but that neoconservative is another word/term like fascism and has some ambiguity depending upon who you listen to.

This Wiki article states it has been used a lot by different authors in different lights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocon

[edit] Evolution of neoconservative views
[edit] Usage and general views
The term has been used before, and its meaning has changed over time.

- Writing in The Contemporary Review (London) in 1883, Henry Dunckley used the term to describe factions within the Conservative Party;

- James Bryce again uses it in his Modern Democracies (1921) to describe British political history of the 1880s.

- The German authoritarians Carl Schmitt, who became professor at the University of Berlin in 1933, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck were called "neo-conservatives".[45]

- In "The Future of Democratic Values" in Partisan Review, July-August 1943, Dwight MacDonald complained of "the neo-conservatives of our time [who] reject the propositions on materialism, Human Nature, and Progress." He cited as an example Jacques Barzun, who was "attempting to combine progressive values and conservative concepts."

- In the early 1970s, democratic socialist Michael Harrington used the term in its modern meaning. He characterized neoconservatives as former leftists – whom he derided as "socialists for Nixon" – who had moved significantly to the right. These people tended to remain supporters of social democracy, but distinguished themselves by allying with the Nixon administration over foreign policy, especially by their support for the Vietnam War and opposition to the Soviet Union. They still supported the welfare state, but not necessarily in its contemporary form.

- Irving Kristol remarked that a neoconservative is a "liberal mugged by reality," one who became more conservative after seeing the results of liberal policies. Kristol also distinguished three specific aspects of neoconservatism from previous forms of conservatism: neo-conservatives had a forward-looking approach drawn from their liberal heritage, rather than the reactionary and dour approach of previous conservatives; they had a meliorative outlook, proposing alternate reforms rather than simply attacking social liberal reforms; they took philosophical ideas and ideologies very seriously.[46]

- Political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was an important intellectual antecedent of neoconservativism. Strauss notably influenced Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller Closing of the American Mind.

- In January 2009, at the close of President George W. Bush's second term in office, Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, proposed the following as the "main characteristics of neoconservatism"[44]:

"a tendency to see the world in binary good/evil terms
low tolerance for diplomacy
readiness to use military force
emphasis on US unilateral action
disdain for multilateral organizations
focus on the Middle East
an us verses them mentality".

_________________________________________

So it looks like another clusterfuck. I read and I'll try to find it, that neo-cons were labeled as such for their transition during one of their few losses of the WH during the Wilson terms. Their entire value systems changed.

At any rate, Harding was the opposite of traditional 1860 - 1912 Republicans, even if the term, "neo-con" is incorrect, that was my point; the Repiblican Party took on a whole new and ugly face after being the saviors of the US all those decades.

[SpeedRacer 1]

Yep, the word "fascism" has been abused as well. Orwell once lamented that it had changed from its original meaning to just meaning "something undesirable."

Here's the wikipedia discussion of fascism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

"The term fascismo is derived from the Italian word fascio, which means "bundle" or group, and from the Latin word fasces; a fasces was a bundle of sticks used symbolically for the power through unity.[23][24] The fasces, which consisted of a bundle of rods that were tied around an axe, were an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate; they were carried by his Lictors and could be used for corporal and capital punishment at his command.[24]

Furthermore, the symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.[25] This is a familiar theme throughout different forms of fascism; for example the Falange symbol is a bunch of arrows joined together by a yoke.[
"

The "strength through unity" ideal is totalitarianism, the idea that the whole nation will only be strong if it is united under ONE political party.

So the word "fascist" was abused in the late 60s & 70s by some on the left to refer to any corporation that makes a lot of money, and now the word "fascist" is being abused by some on the right to refer to any government that administers healthcare.

Both of these pseudo-definitions are bullshit.

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[Lucky... 0]

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Yep, the word "fascism" has been abused as well. Orwell once lamented that it had changed from its original meaning to just meaning "something undesirable."

Here's the wikipedia discussion of fascism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

"The term fascismo is derived from the Italian word fascio, which means "bundle" or group, and from the Latin word fasces; a fasces was a bundle of sticks used symbolically for the power through unity.[23][24] The fasces, which consisted of a bundle of rods that were tied around an axe, were an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate; they were carried by his Lictors and could be used for corporal and capital punishment at his command.[24]

Furthermore, the symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.[25] This is a familiar theme throughout different forms of fascism; for example the Falange symbol is a bunch of arrows joined together by a yoke.[
"

The "strength through unity" ideal is totalitarianism, the idea that the whole nation will only be strong if it is united under ONE political party.

So the word "fascist" was abused in the late 60s & 70s by some on the left to refer to any corporation that makes a lot of money, and now the word "fascist" is being abused by some on the right to refer to any government that administers healthcare.

Both of these pseudo-definitions are bullshit.

All true, but I think some ideals of fascism that are constant are:

- Corporatism

- Anti-organized labor

- Some older forms would include minor totalinarianism

But yea, the word has been bastardized based upon need and it appears so has neoconservatism. I imagine the side that gets called whatever term that has derrogatory connotations would tend to manufacture alternates in defense. Of course it isn't always that coreoghaphed, but it can work that way.

[Lucky... 0]

So back to the issue; aren't these RW rags just grand? I mean, why don't they at least try to be creative rather than post blatant lies as with the alleged tripling of taxes by FDR?

[ChangoLanzao 0]

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So back to the issue; aren't these RW rags just grand? I mean, why don't they at least try to be creative rather than post blatant lies as with the alleged tripling of taxes by FDR?

Quote

Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels."

—Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996

[kelpdiver 2]

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It looks like your mostly right, but that neoconservative is another word/term like fascism and has some ambiguity depending upon who you listen to.

IOW, you're going to continue to use it to describe anyone that disagrees with you.

Just like "liberal" in the early 90s.

[Belgian_Draft 0]

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It looks like your mostly right, but that neoconservative is another word/term like fascism and has some ambiguity depending upon who you listen to.

IOW, you're going to continue to use it to describe anyone that disagrees with you.

Just like "liberal" in the early 90s.

Seems like a continuation of other threads started by him. More accurate thread title would be "Conservative Bashing, Part IV"

HAMMER:
Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a
kind of divining rod to locate the most expensive parts adjacent the
object we are trying to hit.

[Lucky... 0]

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It looks like your mostly right, but that neoconservative is another word/term like fascism and has some ambiguity depending upon who you listen to.

IOW, you're going to continue to use it to describe anyone that disagrees with you.

Just like "liberal" in the early 90s.

Actually I'm probably not, as I think it has been littered with ambiguity.

Liberal hasn't chamged it's def, it has just come into fashion after 8 years of awesome growth, followed by 8 years of massive devastation from the conservative side.

[Lucky... 0]

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Quote

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It looks like your mostly right, but that neoconservative is another word/term like fascism and has some ambiguity depending upon who you listen to.

IOW, you're going to continue to use it to describe anyone that disagrees with you.

Just like "liberal" in the early 90s.

Seems like a continuation of other threads started by him. More accurate thread title would be "Conservative Bashing, Part IV"

Or in this case, THE TRUTH from the left uncovering the BS from the right wing rags. Can you argue any of the entries I posted?

[mnealtx 0]

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Quote

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It looks like your mostly right, but that neoconservative is another word/term like fascism and has some ambiguity depending upon who you listen to.

IOW, you're going to continue to use it to describe anyone that disagrees with you.

Just like "liberal" in the early 90s.

Seems like a continuation of other threads started by him. More accurate thread title would be "Conservative Bashing, Part MMDXIV"

Fixed that for you.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706