LOL! How true.... As for Ms Maddow, shouldn't that be Mr Maddow>
Posted on 09/09/2011 4:37:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
During the recent GOP presidential debate, MSNBC ran self-promotional commercials for itself. That's OK; all networks do it. The Hebrew philosopher Hillel's famous line "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" applies for cable news networks, too. And given MSNBC's ratings, that wisdom is particularly poignant.
The long-running "Lean Forward" marketing campaign features different MSNBC hosts waxing poetic on the glories of government and liberalism. The ad they kept running during the debate features Rachel Maddow standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam. The spots are a widespread source of ridicule in conservative circles, mostly because they show Maddow on the precipice of the dam in an ad hectoring us all to "lean forward." You first, Ms. Maddow.
But the real joke of the commercial is the argument behind it. Maddow objects when "people tell us no, no, no we're not going to build it. No, no, no, America doesn't have any greatness in its future. America has small things in its future. Other countries have great things in their future. China can afford it. We can't." She replies to this chorus of strawmen, "You're wrong and it doesn't feel right to us and it doesn't sound right to us because that's not what America is." It's one of several ads equating American greatness with big infrastructure spending on the scale of the Hoover Dam.
The reason the ad is so funny is that nobody thinks liberals such as Maddow would support anything like the Hoover Dam today. The Hoover Dam is a marvel. But by today's green standards, it is a crime against nature. If you tried to build it, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace would be in court tomorrow blocking it, with Ms. Maddow cheering them on.
Indeed, look at all the activists attacking the proposed construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. It would create thousands of construction jobs and yet liberals oppose it for the usual petrophobic reasons. Ironically, liberals love building highways and bridges, but loathe making it affordable to drive on them.
This is just a small example of the Catch-22 liberalism has found itself in. The left yearns to "go big" but it wants to do so through the extremely narrow routes it has created for itself. They say government must rush into this economic crisis like firemen into a burning building. But they also don't want to lighten the useless baggage the firemen must carry or remove the Byzantine obstacle course they've decreed the figurative firefighters must run through before getting to work.
Everyone in Washington should reread Jonathan Rauch's 1994 book "Demosclerosis," a term Rauch coined to describe "government's progressive loss of the ability to adapt." Thanks to the rise of interest-group liberalism, constituencies grow up around government programs and policies that do not benefit the general public. Obviously, these constituencies care more about their programs than the average voters do so they make up for their low numbers with high intensity. The mohair subsidy is the number one priority of only one group of Americans: recipients of mohair subsidies. More significantly, organized labor makes up a tiny fraction of the workforce, but dictates vast swaths of labor policy in this country.
As the number of interest groups claiming sovereignty over their own little slices of policy multiplies, government's maneuvering room shrinks.
Rauch compared the problem to the "hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years." Before you know it, first responders to Hurricane Katrina have to undergo sensitivity training before they can save people from drowning and "shovel ready" green jobs require months of "prevailing wage" compliance paper-pushing and are too expensive anyway. Boston's Big Dig took two decades to build; the far more ambitious Hoover Dam, Maddow and company love, took four.
Look, I'm no Keynesian, but there should have been at least an economic sugar rush from the stimulus. There wasn't, in large part because government has lost its flexibility. We poured money down the same mostly clogged bureaucratic drain. When the last bit burbled away, we were told we must "invest" even more in infrastructure and education. We've been doing that for decades. In terms of spending, adjusted for inflation, the size of government has increased 50 percent over the last decade alone.
Who thinks we got anything like a positive return on that "investment"? Why didn't we? Because money isn't the problem, government is.
communists are only good for one thing... ONE THING!
LLS
- The Government
The Hoover Dam isn’t a shovel ready project.
four? I'll assume that's four years not decades..
*
When we were ALL TRULY "Ameri-CANS" America worked....now Americans and ILLEGALS just are "GIMME'.s"
LOL! How true.... As for Ms Maddow, shouldn't that be Mr Maddow>
I have no empirical evidence to prove it, but right now it seems, most people are not out spending, hiring, consuming because they are not happy with the leadership or path of government. The fact that our leaders are not listening to, or doing anything about, any of the issues facing average Americans, adds into it as well.
So since I, as an average American, being ignored by my ‘leaders’ I still have an option that is available to me to do my part to institute change. I can choose to NOT be a part of perpetuating this madness. I can sit and accumulate my wealth, and spend it on what I feel is necessary, and not listen to this clown college we call an administration.
Since it is the conservative money that government needs to keep giving away (since your typical liberal takes more than they give), I will do my part to starve the beast. Nancy Pelosi can stomp her feet all she wants, and whine that we need to “get to the podium and say something!!”, the time for talk is done.
It’s action time. Or more to the point, inaction time.
With 9/11 just around the corner, these specs from the World Trade Center speak volumes as to where we have come down to:
Groundbreaking for the World Trade Center took place on August 5, 1966. The North Tower was completed in December 1972 and the South Tower was finished in July 1973. The construction project involved excavating a large amount of material, which was later used as landfill to build Battery Park City on the west side of Lower Manhattan. The cost for the construction was $400 million ($2,169,167,354 in 2011 dollars).Done in six years. They've been building the replacement "memorial" for eleven years and still aren't done.
$2.2 billion in construction cost. I wonder how many jobs, temporary during construction and permanent once the buildings opened, that money provided? nobama's latest "jobs" scam is going to cost 2000 times that amount. I'd bet money Porkulus II won't create 10% of the jobs the WTC created.
Just some trivia, but the Big Dig was last part that completed the Interstate Highway system.
The Hoover Dam was built by NON-UNION Labor, and today, Union Labor costs compared to the non-Union alternative is 30% to 50% overpriced. It's why manufacturing is moved offshore, as the Unions priced themselves out of a job. Now, Unions expect Democrats to FORCE Union labor, via Government cronies Regulations/Law/etc. in the PRIVATE SECTOR (see Boeing/South Carolina, where the Union-infested NLRB is stepping in to protect the flow of Union dues to the DNC).
When a company can't compete due to Union Labor costs, they leave town. With the NLRB getting on their case to force them to use Union Labor, they will leave the Country.
She’s got insects crawling on her neck.
The leftists in the gov’t are looking for an opportunity to crack down on any action that we take to oppose them, or to fight back.
I like your “silent strike” tactic. It gives them nothing to focus on and use the force of government against, but it totally resists their efforts.
It has that “classic lesbian” look. For some reason, they all seem to end up looking like that.
I would have to assume that even you would “refrain”....
I didn’t see the ad with Rachel Maddow standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam, if I had I would have been screaming, JUMP-—JUMP.
I’d hit it! (With bug spray......from 10ft away)
My math is wrong. nobama’s scam cost 200 times what the WTC cost, not 2000. Sorry.
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