Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Repeat re Stossel .. excerpts ..

In a final act of desperation, you tug furiously at the door to the john. It’s no use. Your sphincter relents and you deposit in your shorts. “Give me a break!” the clone chorus repeats. The police, also now privatized, respond to calls from the offended citizenry with lightning speed and beat you unconscious with half the blows of a municipal force. You can rest assured that, even as you’ve destroyed your boxers, trousers and possibly even your shoes—to say nothing of your standing in the community or among coworkers—the exclusive commode remains sparklingly inviolate, unharmed by freeloading, feculent wretches like you. If only you’d learned to share before it came to this.

Welcome to John Stossel’s future: a dystopia so uniquely terrifying,
neither Orwell’s nor Huxley’s darkest previsions anticipated it.

[...]

Stossel began his reporting career as a consumer advocate on the local news in New York City and later was a consumer editor for ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He joined “20/20” in 1981. I don’t know whether it was the sound bitch-slapping he received from pro wrestler “Dr. D” David Schultz in 1984 (for blowing the lid off the secret that pro wrestling is fake) or something as simple as a massive check from the American Enterprise Institute, but something transformed Stossel. In the ‘90s, ostensibly tired of his custodial role, he was quoted as saying, “I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market.”

This was a seminal admission for Stossel, an epiphanic renunciation of objectivity and journalistic responsibility. It’s essentially all you have to understand about him. All of his reports, real or fabricated, are uncontested promotions of the supremacy of unregulated capitalism. You don’t often hear grown men using the word “magical,” unless maybe they’re waxing rhapsodic about Andrew Lloyd Webber, or plying children with candy or kittens for dubious purposes; but such is Stossel’s free-market rapture.

[...]

Stossel’s examples of public vs. private ownership are each jarringly wrong in their own special way, but his view of the fishing industry reveals either a deep inner conflict about the free market panacea he’s peddling, or a total misapprehension of his own ideology. He explains that years ago fisherman had essentially unfettered access to oceans and hence, depleted supplies. Ignoring the glaring failure of basic market forces to correct this plunder-for example, by the formation of a fishing consortium to protect stocks-Stossel instead presents the New Zealand government’s distribution of licenses to fisherman as a model of privatization success.

“Because the fishermen own those rights, it’s private property. The government can’t take it away from them.” Incredibly, Stossel doesn’t seem to understand that that’s exactly what the government did: took away each fisherman’s right to fish as much as he pleased. “The fisherman are free to buy or sell those fishing rights, just like private property.” Fishing stocks, he says, went up. But it isn’t private property in the way Stossel understands it or promotes it in his other examples. In fact, it’s textbook government regulation: the very thing Stossel hates and argues is doomed to fail.

It’s this infuriating incongruity between points that makes Stossel the worst of his breed. Stossel’s greatest asset, then, is actually his frenetic pacing-a meticulous blurring and blending, moving between fundamentally distinct subjects and drawing from them tailored conclusions-that creates a veneer of plausibility. Superficiality is crucial.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80527988

Stossel said to Ron

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxe6msE-yRE

at 5:04 .. "You were in Congress for 35 years. Anything get better?
Ron didn't question the 35 years, then said, "No. It all got worse"

Slightly stunned. Ron? Surely something must be better since 1988 .. then,
all of a sudden the feeling to check Ron's 35 years in Congress swelled ..

Paul has served in Congress three different periods: first from 1976 to 1977, after
he won a special election, then from 1979 to 1985, and finally from 1997 to 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul#Tenure

Ok .. 1 + 6 + 16 = 23 Almost 35 if the digits are reversed. Both John and Ron can't be wrong. Scratching
head. Please help someone. Seriously. Where did Ron's 35 years in Congress come from? Must be
missing something really simple there. It won't ruin my day if i am, but what the hell is it?

Anyway, not so important is it. More interesting is Ron's "No. It
all got worse." Ron? Nothing here at all you could feel good about?

March/ April 2012 Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishments

By Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper, and Siyu Hu

(Also check out the main article, The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama ..
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_2012/features/the_incomplete_greatness_of_ba035754.php , and the issue’s Editor’s Note .. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril_2012/editors_note/clintons_third_term035760.php .)

1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.

8. Recapitalized Banks: In the midst of financial crisis, approved controversial Treasury Department plan to lure private capital into the country’s largest banks via “stress tests” of their balance sheets and a public-private fund to buy their “toxic” assets. Got banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government.

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Ended 1990s-era restriction and formalized new policy allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time.

10. Toppled Moammar Gaddafi: In March 2011, joined a coalition of European and Arab governments in military action, including air power and naval blockade, against Gaddafi regime to defend Libyan civilians and support rebel troops. Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule ended when the dictator was overthrown and killed by rebels on October 20, 2011. No American lives were lost.

11. Told Mubarak to Go: On February 1, 2011, publicly called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to accept reform or step down, thus weakening the dictator’s position and putting America on the right side of the Arab Spring. Mubarak ended thirty-year rule when overthrown on February 11.

12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies: Two days after taking office, nullified Bush-era rulings that had allowed detainees in U.S. custody to undergo certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques considered inhumane under the Geneva Conventions. Also released the secret Bush legal rulings supporting the use of these techniques.

13. Improved America’s Image Abroad: With new policies, diplomacy, and rhetoric, reversed a sharp decline in world opinion toward the U.S. (and the corresponding loss of “soft power”) during the Bush years. From 2008 to 2011, favorable opinion toward the United States rose in ten of fifteen countries surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, with an average increase of 26 percent.

14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program, Expanded Pell Grant Spending: As part of the 2010 health care reform bill, signed measure ending the wasteful decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting July 2010 all students began getting their federal student loans directly from the federal government. Treasury will save $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants to lower-income students.

15. Created Race to the Top: With funds from stimulus, started $4.35 billion program of competitive grants to encourage and reward states for education reform.

16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards: Released new fuel efficiency standards in 2011 that will nearly double the fuel economy for cars and trucks by 2025.

17. Coordinated International Response to Financial Crisis:
Continued: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_2012/features/obamas_top_50_accomplishments035755.php

Not even 4 and/or 5? .. Maybe something else here? Obama's Achievements Center - http://obamaachievements.org/

Bit gloomy isn't he .. perhaps some music might help ..

Elaine Paige & Andrew Lloyd-Webber - Memory -1981 Royal Variety

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZQ5wgMpYg

Seriously, where did John's and Ron's 35 years come from??? I can't see it.