President's Speech
 

I'm kinda surprised there isn't a thread here on Obama's speech Tuesday night. Unfortunately for me, I'm too tired/brain dead at this time to really start any real discussion. So what did you all think of the speeches?

Apparently the speeches are too long for me to post it here, but here's the transcripts for Pres. Obama's speech on CNN.com. And also the Republican response to the speech given by Gov. Jindal.

Jindel has always struck me a an oily kind of guy, someone you wouldn't trust with a dime. I don't know why he struck me that way, but he did.

Of course, he has basically proven my initial reaction wrong by doing most everything he said he was gonna do when he ran for governor (Of course, the Louisiana roads still suck ass despite his promises to the contrary, but thats because the people there don't pay taxes to fix the roads, and they like it that way.), and Louisiana seems to be much better for it. While his speech seemed a little pointed, to say the least, even after all the bi-partisan talk Jindel seems to be a pretty good and honest guy (For a politician.), and I agree with most of what he said in his speech.

Anyone else notice that Jindal seemed to argue points which Obama didn't even make?

I couldn't make it through that transcript of Jindal's speech. It just screamed condescension to me.

I'm a heavily biased liberal, so I basically ate Obama's speech up and wanted more, but I feel the need to mention that Obama seems to keep his eye on the way the rumor mill goes. Whenever a nasty batch of misleading rumors pop up about his policies, he seems to put a stop to it immediately. He did this Tuesday with the rumors about taxes being raised for everyone, rather than just people who make 250k a year. I never really got that from Bush, and I wasn't old enough to pay attention to Clinton.

Bush Sr was ousted for saying "Read my lips, no new taxes" then going against that to finance the conflict in the Persian Gulf. And a few other things.

Clinton put stops to excessive pays for CEOs but we were in a boom economy. All his hard work stopped their salaries but didn't stop their options. Most of them made far more money out of that than they did with salary pay.

Jr signed us a tax cut in the form of a rebate check... Near the beginning of this recession when no one needed it.

Obama wants to tax the rich but I don't necessarily see how he can use the government to fund all of the programs he wishes to support. I'll have to read the speech later today and edit this post.

Simply. Beautiful.

YES. Someone GETS it! Laws won't pass that hold no water. Sadly it seems more a pipe dream since Congress can't look INTO the laws they pass and see the effects, but instead look to pass whatever and let it all stick us in the rear end.

I would say that volcanoes are a SERIOUS problem... But hey, it's a job right? ;)

Same here. Government should stay the heck away from business except for taxes.

Is it just me or is Obama steering the convo to an advertisement for green energy?

... Never mind... It seems that with the excise tax on offshore drilling along with the rhetoric, Obama is going for the rich and overly famous to pay for everything...

Ya know... It's been a while. But who didn't want oversight again? Democrats when they had control... Yet more news unreported... *sigh*

And he STILL believes in No Child Left Behind?! An act that's nearly impossible to enforce, gives a quota system to teachers and is a true disservice to the US because we can't teach our children grammer, writing, or a myriad of other things that they may need later in life because a computer skill is so much more efficient? Which of those police officers have a quota that would have released them to possibly find better jobs in security or finish degrees and move on with their lives? The world may never know...

Good. How about we go back to the cash standard? You don't have enough money, you don't NEED to go into debt.

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TL: DR version

Obama's speech, though charismatic is just a pile of fluff. I didn't get through the entire thing without getting upset in some way at the words that could be disseminated. It's as if he doesn't listen to anyone but the political party about ideas on how to "fix" the economy. A damn bandaid isn't going to help this gaping hole that's been there for quite some time. How about backing away from the law making and using some oversight to see what went wrong and fix that? Somehow spending money to fix all the programs and problems seems wrong on so many levels... But I'm tired. I believe I have said enough for one night.

Which is it?

To be honest, reading your first few quotes, I thought they were from Obama, not the Republican response to his speech. That's very interesting and somewhat telling. Maybe if we stripped party labels and persons from quotes and just looked directly at what they are saying, we'd stop mindlessly agreeing with just one party and also mindlessly demonizing the other.

I agree that the government doesn't need more power. I find that sentiment ironic from the Republicans given their actions in strengthening the government and inflating spending over the last 8 years.

I also agree that the government's role is to create a land of equal opportunity, and that those with extravagant success can afford to part with a larger share of their wealth than those who can barely afford the cost of living. I also agree that we need to invest in infrastructure upgrades to make our economy more efficient. I disagree with the bailouts that perpetuate inefficiency and "save" our flawed economic model that caused the financial crisis to begin with. I think we need more regulation and oversight for business and less government control over our daily lives.

I'll have to read these speeches to see where I stand on them.

The oversight power seems to be used infrequently by Congress as a whole. There are so many laws that are being passed with over 600 pages of nothing but pork because A company needs this need and B person wants that.

As well, NONE of the bills make sense. How can you interpret it and read it and know what you're doing when part A groups to columns A, C, and H but then part B groups to columns W, O, R, T, H, L, E, and S in that order. Oh, and part C repeals L, A, W and S or something from five years ago.

I disagree. Why should we make everyone equal to an invisible standard? Protect people from swindlers, yes, but to give them a handout because they're not on equal footing?

Our housing market attests to people getting money or moratorium extensions because of an inability to pay all of their bills. Not that I'm against helping people that are poor, but it seems to do a disservice to people that have the ability to pay their bills on time.

Regards to infrastructure, yes, I'm with you there. But I do believe more regulation and oversight may cause more problems.

Ex: Citibank has to go to the well a third time and Obama made an executive order that they have to give an update every month. Normally, businesses give a quarterly update. Because of special circumstances, I believe that's going to put more stress and paperwork on the table than is really cause for.

Oversight before hand, good. See the problem and fix it. Oversight after the fact is hindsight... That's what we should have learned in the history lessons.

To answer the second question, there has been talk of nationalizing banks which would REALLY be bad. Even if temporary, I believe that would be the WORST decision in the history of the US. Two things are certain in life: Death and taxes. As was stated in the quote, dependency on the government for everything isn't the way to get America back on its feet. I just don't believe everything should be handled by the government as the Democratic party believes..

-Edit- This post seems much better.

So just going through the highlights of Jindal's thing he did:

I don't know what's better, the part where he's using the government's failure to act as a reason for why the government should refuse to act, or the part where he's using the total inability of his own party's leadership to lead in a crisis to argue that his own party should be in power. Either way, the man's cojones must be the size of basketballs.

I mean it's great that he told a swell little anecdote about a bunch of untrained yokels rushing into a disaster area with as much chance of killing themselves as saving anybody, but some of us think it'd be nice if we had something like say, organized efforts run by people actually trained to deal with that sort of thing. Hey, maybe the reason bureaucrats were holding up relief efforts was because they were taking orders from a guy whose primary qualification was judging horse shows.

I also like that the hero of his story there is, you know, a government authority. But sheriffs don't count because... shit, I don't even know.

Then we've got this -

- because Republican leadership loves nothing more than treating governance like a game of mad-libs where the entry for every blank is tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts. I assume Jindal thinks that eight years of blowing out the treasury and trying to run the government on fumes and foreign debt has worked out so well thus far.

From there it's sort of a laundry list of terrible ideas and stuff like this --

-- where we're pretending that insurance company bureaucrats aren't a thing that exists, and just you know, yeah. And I guess something about volcano monitoring and maglev trains because what we definitely don't under any circumstances want to have are bitchin' rad high-speed supertrains or like, knowing when volcanoes are going to erupt and kill people. Which in the latter case I guess I can't be surprised that the man who thinks the ideal government response to a natural disaster is to sit around with its dick in its hands while a bunch of jess'-folks scamper out in their boats into the middle of a disaster zone, thinks that if a volcano goes off we can just have all the Real Americans I don't know, blockade the lava with their Ford F-150s.

Also, to add something I read somewhere else: Volcano monitoring also helps everybody figure out when a volcano is about to spew a huge column of ash 'n' stuff into the air. This is an exceedingly good thing to know if, say, you fly an airplane because ash in your airplane's engines will, I'm led to understand, fuck your plane up pretty good. I suppose one could argue that crashing airplanes leads to building airplanes, but there're safer ways to stimulate the economy.

You misconstrue my intentions, good sir. Equal opportunity is not making everyone economic equals. To quote Billy Joel,

"Every child had a pretty good shot/
To get at least as far as their old man got./
But something happened on the way to that place./
They threw an American flag in our face."

aaaaaa-aaaaa-aace.

Oh woah, oh. (shh! oom! Ah!)

And it's getting very hard to staaaaaaaaay,
And we're living here in Allentown."

I'm saying that if we all have a burden to shoulder, those who are able to shoulder more burden shouldn't be excused from their share of the work.

So you're not against helping the poor, you're just against helping the poor, because they can't pay bills, because they're poor? We should reserve the handouts for the people who already have lots of money, because they need the money more? Frankly why exactly shouldn't we hold everyone as equal before an "invisible standard*"?

In what way does making Citi appraise us of how they're spending their billions of dollars in public money, so as we can make sure they are not subsequently wasting and robbing us of our money, not count as oversight beforehand? Why would we assume that the potential risks of oversight are worse than the demonstrable risks of a lack of oversight?