Nancy Reagan?

Bush Taps DeLay
 

Looks like W will be taking Tom DeLay on the fun-filled Social Security sales pitch tour.

Using DeLay to sell privatizing Social Security. This should be interesting.

I can hear the echo of Spanky's screams. On the plus side, it looks like I may not have to write a check to DeLay to help him stay firmly in the party vanguard.

Bush Taps DeLay
 

Apparently they are going to go after Reid on SS. They have pulled up a 20 year old bill that he sponsored that, as I understand it, proposed to exclude members of congress from SS.

Bush Taps DeLay
 

Well, in fairness, he asked some Dems to go, too, but everyone was too tied up redrafting and refiling all of their disclosure forms for the past five years which show that they were all doing the same things they want to demonize Delay for now.

Too funny.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7634382

Bush Taps DeLay
 

A 20-year old bill from Reid seems like an excellent rationale for dismantling one of the most effective government programs of all time.

Bush Taps DeLay
 

I'm looking for the part of that article that says Dems refused to participate in discussing Social Security because they were revising their travel records.

Or did you just make that up?

Bush Taps DeLay
 

effective at what? Mortgaging the future?

Let me be somewhat more clear, so as not to be accused of dumbing down the dialog: Social security has been extremely effective at eliminating, or reducing substantially, poverty among the elderly. Arguably it has also stimulated the labor market by giving an incentive for less efficient workers to move into retirement, rather than hang onto a job. It's design, however, rested on a premise that time has disproven--that the fundamental contours of the age pyramid would remain the same, yet it hasn't. Because of the commitments put in place 50 or 75 years ago, the government now faces, or will face in future years, substantial payment obligations well beyond the funding available for them. While of course those obligations can be met, it will require resort to general tax revenues. In itself, not necessarily a problem. But the bigger pictue problem remains: how much of the country's future are we willing to mortgage by supporting an older generation who has been lulled into complacency with respect to supporting themselves by an ever-growing social support state.

Interesting article by Thomas Sowell, proposing that culture (more specifically, Southern culture), rather than race, is the primary reason for the disparity between blacks and whites:

• Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?
  
  Culture is left.
  
  The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.
  
  Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.
  
  While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110006608

Bush Taps DeLay
 

Could you first show me a copy of your check for Delay's re-election before I answer this?

(Damn, man, if there's no room for humor here, it's going to be a dry, boring place.

Oh, wait, . . .)

Translation: I can piss off everyone at once!

But he does it with a fairly valid and dry statistical analysis, which is an impressive achievement in and of itself.

I, for one, am too sleepy to deal with this. Y'all may commence the celebrations of that immediately.

lies, damn lies, statistics.

Nice feeding of the flames with "fairly valid." No, I didn't read the clip, but it didn't seem long enough to have explained its methods enough to verify validity.

It's based on his new book. I'm sure there is enough in there for you to verify validity (or not).

I can only say "fairly valid" - and maybe I should have said "seemingly valid" instead - because I ain't a statistician. But, read it. It does seem to make some sense. It doesn't come off as some race-baiting flame at all. Sowell's never been that type. He's more a Cosby-esque figure.