Why Rick Santorum has won me over.

Actually, I own a national employment firm. Surprised?

 

for repo recovery services or collection agencies?

 

LOL! No. We work with attorneys (not bankruptcy or collection), paralegals, legal secretaries, IT, helpdesk, CIOs, CMO's etc...

Until about six months ago, we had maybe fifteen positions under contract. Fifteen.
Now?
We have over one hundred fifty and I'm hiring people to handle all the demand. What demand? Demand from employers who pay us a minimum of $5000 each for a secretary or paralegal and anywhere from $50K - 200K each for an attorney or oficer level employee.
Boston, DC, NYC, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Dallas, The Bay Area, LA, San Diego... everywhere but Michigan.
Most of our work is done in intellectual property law but guess where the other biggest growing demand is? Corporate transactions. This is always a sign of a positive economic trend.

 

I did not and am not saying that all Republicans are racist. And I'm not denying that there are racists among Democrats and liberals. I'm not saying that being an immigration hawk automatically makes you a racist, either. But it's pretty hard to deny there's been a lot of pretty blatant hate directed at Latinos. It's also pretty hard to deny that the Republican party has been pandering to that hate for years to one degree or another. So long as the Republican mainstream is giving a wink and a nod to folks who pretty clearly want to deport people simply for being Latino, Republicans simply are not going to vote Republican, and it's unrealistic to think they might.

~_~ Your own post said it was 1.5 million jobs lost under Obama. I didn't check that number but it sounds about right to me. That's not MILLIONS. I get your point, but keep things in perspective, okay? Like I said, if job creation continues at the rate of the last four months, that 1.5 million will be zero by the time of the election. And since almost all of that job loss happen in the first few months of the Obama administration, and given that the economy doesn't exactly turn on a dime, it's pretty unrealistic to call that Obama's fault to begin with.

The Recovery Act created 1.4 - 3.3 million jobs and lowered unemployment by 0.7 - 1.8 points at the peak of the reception. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11706/08-24-ARRA.pdf
The 10% unemployment we had is considerably better then 11% or 12%. And the unemployment rate of 8% we have now is considerably better then that 10%. If you want to argue that the Recovery Act was not as effective as it should have been, or that it didn't use money on the most effective sorts of stimulus, you can probably make a decent case for that. But trying to say the Recovery Act failed, or that stimulus doesn't work... I'm sorry, but the facts clearly say that just ain't so.

And I'd remind you that pork is very much in the eye of the beholder.

I just want to say thanks, Noparty. I may not agree with you on some things, but it's great to have a factual argument to discuss. And it's also really nice to see a genuine moderate on here. ^_^

I disagree with your overall assessment of Obama. My feeling is that Obama has accomplished a surprising amount despite huge challenges, both external and political. When assessing how well a politician has done, I try to keep two maxims in mind: "Politics is the art of the possible," and "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." The Recovery Act could have been better, maybe should have been better. But it was still good. It helped the economy a lot, and pulled us back from the brink. Like you said, when Obama first took office, turning on the news required anti-depressants. The recovery act had a lot to do with changing that. A short but insightful analysis of the Recovery Act: http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-recovery-act-worked-in-a-few-easy-charts/
Well, at least I think it's insightful.

And I really think most of the blame for the stagnant economy between the initial recovery in 2009 and now belongs to the Republicans. It was Republicans who pushed the idea of a "failed stimulus." It was the Tea Party movement that created such extreme opposition to any sort of further stimulus. My guess is that there would have been another big stimulus probably in 2010 if it weren't for them, and the economy would be in considerably better shape by now

 

When was the last time R's threw Oreo cookies at a black Dem running for office? Or when was a black Dem running for offcie called "Uncle Tom" by a Republican? Or an R calling any black man a sellout to his race?

Well libs have done all that to black conservatives and I never heard the NAACP say a word in protest

I know anyone who favors enforing the immigration laws on the books is tagged a racist. SDems see illegals as the next huge voting block. In fact many Dems are openly wanting illegals to vote in our elections

Many do now thanks to Dems providing them a drivers license at whch time they register to vote at the DMV thanks to "Motor Voter"

The millions are a combination of lost jobs, and those who have given up looking for work in the obama economy.

As far as pork if anyone says this is not pork - they have no concerns how taxpayers money is spent

 

Hmmm. Confusing. You disagree with me and yet do not label me a member of "the other side" or sling any insults?
Unusual here.
Well, While I admire your enthusiasm for your president, I don't share it. He's made several big mistakes. But I'll give you this: He certainly seems to have found his feet during the last year.

 

You are absolutely right - a lot of black conservatives have been treated really badly. And talk about being a sell out to your race bothers me as much as it bothers you. It's wrong, and more people on the left should speak out against it. Like I said before, I'm not in any way holding up the Democrats as paragons of virtue.

But that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about why the Republicans don't get any black votes, and probably have lost the Latino vote, too. There's a reason the overwhelming majority of blacks are Democrats. Republicans have consistently tried to block any measure aimed at helping the black community since Goldwater. Now, I don't really want to get into a debate about Affirmative Action - I recognize there are very legitimate reasons to be opposed to it that have nothing to do with racism. But Republicans have never put forward any sort of alternative. When you have a community that has really serious problems with chronic poverty and crime, and one party consistently at least tries to do things to help the situation, and the other consistently tries to block those efforts and seems to be saying that things are fine as they are, is it really a surprise when that community flocks to the party that's trying to help them? And I think that the nation is really worse off for Republicans not engaging on the issue. Conservatives have often come up with innovative and effective market based approaches to problems. I'm sure they could help the situation with the black community if they put their minds to it.

When it comes to Latinos and immigration, I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I think the majority of people who support a "secure the border" sort of position are not racist and are simply legitimately concerned about national security. But surely you can see that there's a lot of racism aimed at Latinos, too, separate from concern about border security. You don't have to look very far on this very forum to find people who seem to think that Latinos are inherently unable to maintain a civilized society.

I also think that there is a racist component in the immigration law itself that most people don't recognize. Let me put it to you this way. The vast majority of immigrants are simply ordinary people looking for honest work and a chance for a better life. It's simply not true that Latinos are more criminal then other people or that immigrants cost American jobs. If you're concerned about immigrants putting strain on social services like schools, wouldn't the most reasonable thing be to make them legal and get them paying taxes to support those services? In short - why is it illegal for all those people to immigrate here in the first place? Now I'm sure that most people have never even thought about it this way, so people can wind up unwittingly supporting a policy with a racist effect, even though there's not a racist bone in their bodies.

Well, Red, I have no idea where you live or what your opinions on these issues are, but I have noticed that a lot of conservatives get pretty irate when liberals dismiss things like gun rights, or think that farm subsidies and grazing rights are wastes of time and money. Am I right in thinking that a lot of conservatives feel like liberals just don't understand the realities of their lives, and the places they live? Well, it goes both ways, too. The fact is that the US is a very diverse country with lots of different people living lots of different ways. There are some significant cultural divides between different parts of society. If conservatives rightly want liberals to try to understand their concerns, wouldn't it be a good idea for conservatives to try to understand liberal concerns? For example, public transit and Amtrack may seem like a complete waste of money where you live, but where I live they're absolutely essential. Personally, I rely on mass transit for everywhere I need to go, and I'd be in really serious trouble without it. The NEA is the only reason that many places can have a community theater. As for digital TV conversion - I thought conservatives hated unfunded mandates?

I'm surprised that the Wall Street Journal, of all things, would have forgotten the basics of supply and demand. Complaining about stimulus spending on projects with little return on investment, or benefits for people doing nothing at all, they seem to think the problem with the economy is with supply. It's not, the problem is demand. Think about it - if the problem with the economy was that we weren't producing enough, then there would be shortages, right? And shortages result in rising prices. That's not what we see, quite the contrary, we actually had significant deflation in 2009. The problem is a lack of demand. Companies aren't hiring because they don't have enough customers. So almost anything that gets money into people's hands so they can spend it and create more demand will have some stimulus effect. Obviously, it's preferable to spend on things that have a more long term benefit, like infrastructure, and I do think the Recovery Act should have had a lot more spending on it. But in an economy like this, jobs are jobs. Does the WSJ think that building maintenance and renovation is done by robots? And I'm shocked that they are implying that only business tax cuts and not individual tax cuts stimulate the economy. 37% of the Recovery Act was in tax cuts, incidentally. And unemployment benefits don't create jobs? What, do people who get laid off go into hibernation or something so they don't have to pay their bills? Or maybe it's that companies that provide mortgages and cars and groceries and utilities and everything else people need are now staffed by robots and therefore do not create jobs?

Like I said before, you can certainly make a case that the Recovery Act did not spend its money as well as it could have, but saying that it didn't help the economy at all is just silly. And frankly, I find that WSJ article to be extremely disingenuous at best, ignoring economic reality in favor of ideology on many points.

 

LOL I know, I'm pretty weird, but I really think we'd all be better off if we tried talking to each other rather then at each other a bit more.

 

It wasn't a legit news article, it was an opinion piece. Which explains a lot in it.

 

Ah, yes, that certainly does explain a lot. Thanks, Emagatem. I'm still surprised that the WSJ would let something that divorced from reality onto its pages, even as an op/ed. It must be Murdoch's doing.

 

Don't forget anyone who likes to have sex without conceiving a child, including the 99% of sexually active women over the age of 18 in America, who have used contraception that Santorum unequivocally says is "not ok."

 

Okay so other than gays, minorities, non-Christians, LOTS of women, Independents, Moderates and people who have sex... he's a shoe-in!

 

It's easy to have compassion for your own daughter. A real leader needs to have compassion for all of their people, even strangers and people you don't particularly like. I don't think that Santorum is a bad person, I really don't. I'm sure he's a wonderful father. I just think he would be a terrible President. I do think his beliefs (at least as he's expressed them publicly) are both misguided and very destructive to society as a whole. Not to mention at times downright infuriating. But in the end, it's actions that are bad, not people.

Leaving the campaign trail to be with his daughter was the right thing to do, it was good and noble. But it doesn't qualify him to be President.

 

OMG... I think if you gave it a serious effort that you could cause this to happen.