By the Speaker of the House of Representatives, that is. Did you see the interview with the good Speaker Pelosi? The normally placid environment (that solid wooden table!) is not so placid with said guest visiting. Petty to note, perhaps, but I felt as if I were watching a performance, and the performer was a nervous and jittery one.
Anyway, judge the quality of the interview for yourselves. Here are a few choice excerpts from the transcript at Real Clear Politics:
Pelosi: “People are more optimistic outside of Washington D.C. than they are inside of Washington. They want to — they want to be sure that we stick to our path which is to take us out of this economic challenge and not be afraid to do so” – What?
Pelosi: “When the president began and he said that he called for swift, bold action now. And the public responded to it in a very positive way. And he said in a very shall we say professorial way, but also inspirational way, we will harness the sun and the wind and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories, and we’ll invest in science, have better healthcare innovation and schools for the 21st century.” – What?
Pelosi: “Universal healthcare. It’s a place where we are recognizing the damage to our planet by decision that said we have made that we need to reverse. It’s a place where we have to go — we had the industrial revolution, we have the technological revolution. Now we have to have a green revolution.” – What?
Pelosi: “I think there is a realization among all people that all the things we want to do, we need to think in public private — public, public, all different kinds of different combinations on how we get them done, so we can leverage our dollars in a safe way, but leverage our dollars so we get more than just the appropriate dollars.” – What does that even mean?
I could go on and on. What do you suppose she’s saying?
SUPER-DUPER MASSIVE AND IMPORTANT UPDATE: I screwed up – the link is to the 2010 Rose interview that I recently watched, while the excerpts are from the 2009 interview. I honestly did not pick up on that while reading the transcript, obviously. In my defense, here’s an excerpt from the correct transcript:
“It’s so historic. It’s so exhilarating to be part of
history that each one of us in the Congress is on the brink of making
history. This is Social Security, Medicare, health care for all Americans.
So it is its own — it has its own encouragement to it. ”
“It has its own encouragment to it.” Well, there you go. Make fun of me and my faulty memory, and her statement, in the comments. Or just me. Whatever.
One hears the same sort of desperate babbling from madmen and con men, caught ripping off old ladies, trying to talk their way out of the hands of an angry mob
…but leverage our dollars so we get more than just the appropriate dollars.” – What does that even mean?
She means they (Congress) feel they are entitled to even more of our money than is APPROPRIATE, because to have just what is appropriate means there is not enough to skim off the top for their slush funds. Greedy bitches and bastards.
I used to get angry at Pelosi for lying so much. Eventually I figured out she was just dumb as a rock.
It’s like listening to a Barbie Doll with a tape recorder that has been loaded with bits of PC phraseology. Pull her string and a random phrase is uttered.
She’s not dumb. She realizes she can’t possibly reconcile all the competing things she pushes so she speaks in platitudes (which ultimately mean nothing). While she may not be the brightest in some areas, she is remarkably shrewd when it comes to entitlements to her those around her. She learned that extremely well from her family.
It’s worth noting that the quotes you are citing are from the earlier interview about a year ago. I’ve read that transcript and watched most of this interview.
Nancy Pelosi is objectively stupid. Barbie Doll dumb. But she’s an excellent, excellent politician, and a great arm-wrestler in the fistful-of-money category. Far, far better than the president.
Since she is pretty much in control of the country’s future right now, we have reason to be worried.
“we will harness the sun and the wind and the soil …”: at least she didn’t mention blood.
MaxedOutMama: and so it is! I’ll correct the post :)
– Madhu
Here’s another one from the correct transcript:
“Imagine an economy where people can follow their aspirations. If
they’re a creative person, they can be a painter, a musician, a writer, a
photographer, whatever, and not say I have to be job-locked because I need
health care and insurance, that they could start a business, they could be
entrepreneurial.”
Anyway, I give up. This is now the third silly blog misunderstanding I’ve taken part in, in ONE WEEK. How do the big bloggers do it? It’s harder than it looks! I might need a vacation or something.
– Madhu
Just above, Onparkstreet quotes Pelosi: “Imagine an economy where people can follow their aspirations…”. This is an odd statement by Pelosi.
We have a free economy now, where the impediments to choosing a career are mostly imposed by government licensing. She wants healthcare to be untied from a particular employer, when it was Government policy in World War II (price controls) and is now Government tax policy that keeps insurance tied to employers. Plus, the childish idea that when employers write the check, that they are the ones paying for the insurance and presenting a gift to the employee.
In fact, employees pay for the insurance, regardless of who writes the check.
Company Paid Health Insurance is Part of Your Salary
Pelosi’s statement reminds me of this idea from Karl Marx:
There should have been a link above for the quote.
Pelosi’s statement reminds me of this idea from Karl Marx:
@ Andrew_M_Garland:
That is very interesting. She is a DC politician and married into great wealth, I believe? So she’s insulated from the economy, from the creation of economic wealth outside of her own interests, and from, well, the kind of reality most of us live in. San Francisco and Chicago – these are not towns known for being kind to the middle-class. I used to live in Palo Alto and the prices of homes and condos! It’s beautiful, but seriously, I have married friends who can’t wait to leave the Palo Alto area because on a dual professional salary, they both have to work to pay the mortgage and they want more time with the kid!
AP at HotAir has this:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/12/pelosi-obamacare-will-make-it-much-easier-to-be-a-full-time-artist/
– Madhu
Ken defending Barbie. How sweet.
My mother didn’t start sounding like that until she was in her mid 80s.
Limbaugh yesterday was saying she’s out of touch because of the artist remarks. I’m not sure. I’m guessing that kind of talk goes over well with her SF constituency. It is our misfortune that the political accidents that brought us a weak leftist president and a Democratic Congressional supermajority have also given her so much power.
Jim Miller has long called Pelosi a machine pol. I think that’s exactly right. Her father was a machine pol, and the effective one-party nature of SF Congressional politics makes it possible for her to function as a machine pol as a House member.
For the machine pol in a one-party system everything is about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. What you say isn’t very important. How you treat the opposition isn’t very important. Establishing dominance is very important. These characteristics are less than optimal in a Speaker of the House, much less a Speaker who has been gifted so much accidental power.
Pelosi: “I think there is a realization among all people that all the things we want to do, we need to think in public private — public, public, all different kinds of different combinations on how we get them done, so we can leverage our dollars in a safe way, but leverage our dollars so we get more than just the appropriate dollars.” – What does that even mean?
The word “appropriate” was mistranscribed. It should be “appropriated” — which is a legislative term. The word “leverage” is key to decoding this paragraph.
Essentially, Pelosi wants to lead the revolution using money appropriated by congress to the Cause. She hopes the Masses will bring their money to that final battle against reactionary oppressors and bury the enemies of the state under a crushing shower of carefully hoarded proletarian nickles and dimes. She may even see herself dressed as Liberte leading the mob to victory in the French Revolution.
It is easy to make fun of “Botox Nan”. But while her disconnect from reality is more than passing amusing; this Rosa Luxemburg wanna-be is a deadly threat to the Constitution and Republic.
She has scheduled a vote on Healthcare this coming weekend. As is usual with this lot we can expect it to be after hours on weekends, with C-SPAN shut down, and Democrat members of Congress in full bunker mode to avoid contact with those nasty citizens who have the irrational belief that they have some say in government.
That is bad enough. But how they are conducting the vote is the Rubicon. I won’t rehash all the problems with the two Democrat only health care nationalization bills [one from each House] that are under consideration. Suffice it to say that each has provisions that the other House will not accept. Further, they are backed into a Parliamentary corner, so that to do anything, the House has to accept the Senate bill first. Voting for a Senate bill that contains provisions the House will not stand for, and which still contains the specific open bribes for Senate votes [despite Buraq’s statement that they were going to be removed, they are still there in the bill text] based on the promise that they will “fix it later” is not comforting to the handful of Democrats in the House who think that there might actually be elections in November. They are not looking forward to the prospect of leaving the aristocracy and living under the laws they made.
A critical number of Democrats [keep in mind that barring a Senate filibuster; the Democrats have the votes to pass literally anything through Congress if all the Democrats vote for it.] do not want to have a vote for the health care bills on their record.
So it looks like they are going to use what has been dubbed the “Slaughter procedure” named after Democrat Rep. Louise Slaughter. The House and Senate leadership will create a rule that will allow the House and Senate leadership to “deem” a bill as having been passed by their definition without anyone taking a vote on it. The House will then “deem” the Senate bill as being passed into law already, and will offer a separate bill that, may or may not succeed, to pay off the worried Democrat House members sufficiently to make them believe that their gluts are covered. Buraq Hussein Obama will sign whatever they put on his desk, be it nationalization or bribes.
Search Article I of the Constitution as hard as you may; you will not find anything that could justify this action. In fact, it is a direct violation of the Constitution; and it literally comes down to lawmaking and rule by decree of an oligarchy. If they can do this for the Health Care nationalization, it can be done for any law.
An American government that rules in open and deliberate violation of the Constitution is no longer legitimate. The social and political contracts between American citizens and their government is based on the paired concepts of consent of the governed and the limitations of the actions of the government to the bounds of the Constitution. If an American government abrogates those contracts, at that moment it dissolves the bonds of civic duty and obedience to laws made by that government.
Their power, being no longer based in the Constitution which we swear to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’, will be based solely on the coercive organs of the State; the gun, the truncheon, the manacle, and the power to make people disappear.
So yes, laugh at her. But be wary. For within the next week we may be literally dealing with an illegitimate government, run by usurpers of the Constitution. And serious choices will have to be made by Americans.
It sounds dramatic. That is how I write. But it is serious. Critique my writing style all you want, but then try to explain how this can be done, and we would remain a free nation under our laws and Constitution.
Subotai Bahadur
Yes, there are more serious issues here than the way in which the Speaker expresses herself. Time to make some noise before the (?) scheduled vote, I suppose, if you think it’s a bad bill.
– Madhu
I don’t know what she is saying, what I want to know is who stole the ice cream ?
Search Article I of the Constitution as hard as you may; you will not find anything that could justify this action. In fact, it is a direct violation of the Constitution; and it literally comes down to lawmaking and rule by decree of an oligarchy. If they can do this for the Health Care nationalization, it can be done for any law.
They have to be aware of this and if they try this “deeming” shenanigans, it will obviously be challenged in court. Remember that Obama said in an interview that he feels the Constitution is insufficient because it focuses solely on “negative rights” and that it doesn’t stipulate what “government must do on your behalf”. It’s almost like he wants this constitutional challenge. Remember that he ran on the promise that he will “fundamentally change the United States of America”.
“The House minority leader, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in an interview for broadcast Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that if House Democrats had the votes to pass the health care bill they would have acted by now.
“They tried to do this in June and July of last year, if they had the votes then, it would be law. They tried to pass it in September, October, November, December, January, February, guess what? They don’t have the votes,” Boehner said.”
“Search Article I of the Constitution as hard as you may; you will not find anything that could justify this action. In fact, it is a direct violation of the Constitution; and it literally comes down to lawmaking and rule by decree of an oligarchy. If they can do this for the Health Care nationalization, it can be done for any law.”
You are correct. If these people had any regard for the Constitution they won’t be democrats. Remember, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste…and using these tactics to pass “health-care,” so called, will amount to the second opening shot of the disunion of the USA…the first was the election of a doctrinaire Marxist with no resume as president. What his election says about the state-of-mind of the electorate says more about where we are headed as a Republic than just about anything else…Pelosi, Reid, Obama: symptoms of a “nation” that cares more for “stuff” than Liberty. I’m reminded of O Brother Where Art Thou when Cousin Hogwallop sold out the boys to the authorities—his explanation loosely quoted: “I got take care my own, they got this depression going on.” Our culture is not prepared for the consequences and downside to where our political leaders have brought us. Pelosi is no fool (her plastic surgeon didn’t have much to work with or should have his license revoke–don’t know which); none of these folks got where they are being fools—they know exactly what they are doing.
We don’t build much anymore, but we sure consume as though consumption were a birthright. I don’t know; but it’s hard for me to imagine having it both ways for any length of time. Both parties feed this consumer crap back to us, while enacting laws that gut our ability to compete and build stuff. My guess is people may be figuring this out, but I fear too late. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.