The current problems with the Republican Party can truly be viewed in a capsule by listening to This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. This is from the promo.
On our roundtable: Democratic strategist James Carville, Republican strategist Liz Cheney, former McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel and ABC News' George Will join me to debate the week's politics and the future of the Republican Party.
So we have Liz Cheney as a stand in for her husband, Dick and James Carville to provide the humorous one-liners.
More to the point, I can not imagine any two representatives of the main stream media who are more out of touch with their respective realities than George Will and Katrina vanden Heuvel. Will, in particular, has such thick ideological lenses that his vision of the world is totally distorted. Case in point, his positions regarding climate change. If you want to know what is wrong with Republican Party? They listen to people like George Will. I have written to ABC News that I will not watch This Week for any session where Will is part of the program.
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Here is what that "Wise Man" George F. Will recently had to say about the California crisis -- nothing but Republican "Conservative" name-calling, lies, and pseudo-sophisticated "talking points."
Published in the Washington Post, May 3, 2009.
No More California Dreaming
By George F. WillCalifornia's increasingly severe and largely self-inflicted economic crisis will deepen May 19 if, as is probable and desirable, voters reject most of the ballot measures that were drafted as part of a "solution" to the state's budget deficit. They would make matters worse. National economic revival is being impeded because one-eighth of the nation's population lives in a state that is driving itself into permanent stagnation. California's perennial boast -- that it is the incubator of America's future -- now has an increasingly dark urgency.
Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California's business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state's. In the past decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million. California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. The latter is not California's fault; the former is.
If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger's less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent.
Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenue -- high income tax rates on the wealthy. In 2006, the top 1 percent of earners paid 48 percent of the income.
. . .
But what actually ails California is centrist evasions. The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.
California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed. The state is a slow learner and hence will remain a drag on the nation's economy.
. . .
The last sentence of this post brought back memories. The first letter to the editor I wrote to my local paper was in reponse to a George Will article about how money is free speech. I requested that they replace Will with a columnist whose arguments make sense. I don't think that he's delusional; rather, I think that he's paid to confuse others.
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