Showing posts with label eric cantor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eric cantor. Show all posts

Monday, July 19, 2010

Eric Cantor's piddly YouCut site proves Republicans aren't serious about cutting the deficit

Via Twitter, Peter Suderman points out that Republicans plan on campaigning this fall against the federal deficit, but have no plans to actually do anything about it if they take Congress. See Sunday's "Meet The Press" for confirmation. In response to such complaints, National Review's Robert Costa points to Eric Cantor's YouCut website, which he describes:
Cantor debuted YouCut [in May]. Its premise is simple: Each week, Americans can vote for their favorite of five potential spending cuts on the web (or via text message to 68398). Cantor works to bring the winner to the House floor. With one click, you can help to shape the House GOP agenda.

“It allows us to focus on out-of-control federal spending, the number-one issue for millions of Americans,” Cantor says. “For us, it is an unprecedented online project.”
Unprecedented? Whatever. It's also incredibly piddly and lame. Look at the current options YouCut offers for a vote.
* Eliminating unnecessary Congressional spending: Potential savings of $35 million over 10 years.

* Eliminate the "Dodd Earmark" from "ObamaCare:" Savings of $100 million over 10 years.

* Prohibiting first class subsidies on Amtrak: Potential savings of $1.2 billion over 10 years.

* Reform the Energy Star program: $655 million over 10 years.

* Prevent energy assistance payments to dead people: "Hundreds of millions of dollars" over 10 years.
Notice a common attribute? All these options are piddly rounding errors in the gargantuan federal budget, eliminating -- at most -- $120 million a year out of a $3.55 trillion budget! It's simply not a serious attempt to address budget fears; it looks a lot more like feeble, ineffective pandering. Real austerity is going to force people to give up stuff they want or like getting from government. And not just the poor, "unproductive" people. Hard, politically unpopular choices will have to be made. Republicans have never shown the ability to make those choices. Eric Cantor's "unprecedented" web site proves the point.

Monday, March 29, 2010

About the Philly guy who threatened Eric Cantor

Looks like the Philly man who threatened Eric Cantor doesn't discriminate on the basis of party:
According to the federal complaint against him, Norman Leboon of Philadelphia has admitted making some 2,000 videos that contained threats. A sampling of his "work" reveals rambling incoherent videos that mix pseudo-religious incantations with random warnings and threats. In one video he addresses President Obama, Vice President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by name and says, "Your punishment is coming, the swine, it will be severe, and you will beg for mercy to your god, it will be severe, you will know god's swine, god has warned you." (Some conservatives are already chortling over the fact that Leboon contributed to Obama's 2008 campaign, though it's not clear what that's supposed to signify.)
Beyond that, though, there's a pretty clear difference -- to me, at least -- in the threats against Democratic and Republican lawmakers, in that I haven't seen any Democratic lawmakers saying (like Republicans did), "Well, yeah, violence was wrong -- but you can't blame people for being angry!" And incidentally, I haven't read all the comments by the "deranged leftists" at TPM, but they seem pretty solidly behind arresting the guy who threatened Cantor.

There's violent loopiness on both sides. The difference, from what I can tell, is that the GOP leadership does a better job of making excuses for (and even promoting) the violent loops on there side. It's kind of a critical difference.