Last week's "Editorial: The Haiti Distraction," included this: "The slashing of Social Security is being proposed (here for NPR's audio and transcript) and the left slept through that as they continued their drum beats for Haiti."
Did you use the link?
Did you find out about Senators Judd Gregg and Kent Conrad? The love slaves of Peter Peterson who drools at the prospect of finally doing away with Social Security. With Peterson pulling the strings, Conrad and Gregg want to set up the Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action.
December 15th, CNN reported, "CNN has learned President Obama is seriously considering an executive order to create a bipartisan commission that could weigh sweeping tax increases and spending cuts to popular programs like Social Security and Medicare in order to try slash the soaring federal deficit." Yesterday, Jackie Calmes (New York Times) reported US President Barack Obama publicly gave his support to the creation of a commmission and a Congressional vote is expected as early as Tuesday.
Where was Panhandle Media last week when they should have been alerting you, when they should have been sounding the trumpets?
Same place they were January 16, 2009: Nowhere. They ignored Barack's statements then as well. From that day's "Iraq snapshot:"
Turning to US politics, President-elect Barack Obama met with the Washington Post editorial board yesterday. Here for Michael D Shear's text article, here for the sixty-one minute audio. Warning for those listening to the audio, Barack's speaking abilities have not magically improved. Sample: "Uh, obviously military service is uh something we uh honor as a country [. . .] That's going to be something that we uh uh . . ." And four minutes, for those wondering, he takes his first swipe at African-American fathers. Yes, it's Barack singing all his well known tunes. And mixing in a few new ones such as, "It's not something I've said publicly . . . but spending money wisely is not easy." Mostly, the interivew will be remembered as the one where Barack declared War on Social Security. Barack's replied to questions and made vague statements. But, his Love Cult insists, that's just the Nice Guy Barry trying to make nice and get along. He doesn't want to say, "Stupid crooks, Social Security is not going to be chipped away!" Well, actually he does want to say that and he did say that. [. . .] He begins talking about his big "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" that will be held in February and include a motley crew that will "talk about waste." He then segues into Social Security during this response (at approximately 16:14) and states the following:
We're also going to have a discussion about entitlements and how we get a grasp on those. Uh and uh, you know, like i think everybody here is familiar enough with the budget problems to know that as bad as these deficits that we're running up over the next -- that have already been run up -- have been and despite the cost of both TARP and the stimulus, the real problem in our long term deficit actually has to do with our entitlement obligation and the fact that historically uh if our revenues ranged between 18 and 20% of GDP they're now at 16. It's just not sustainable so we're going to have to uh craft a uh what George Stephanopoulos called a grand bargain and I-I try not to use the word grand in anything that I say but uh but we're going to have to shape a baragain. This, by the way, is where there are going to be some very difficult choices and issues of sacrifices and responsibilty and duty are going to come in because what we have done is kick this can down the road. We're now at the end of the road and uh we are not in a position to kick it any further.
Those are right-wing talking points and only the most historically ignorant of Barack's Love Cult will fail to grasp the declaration of war.
But they refused to call it out then and they were awfully silent last week as well.