Go Home

Tracy Burns

4 documents found in 0 seconds.

Get Adobe Flash player

DOWNLOADS: (182)
Download WMV Download Quicktime
PLAYS: (1084)
Play WMV Play Quicktime
Embed

On this Saturday's Cashin' In, the topic of Ron Paul wanting to completely eliminate five of our government agencies was brought up during one of their panel segments and apparently their regular Jonathan Hoenig has decided to turn full-blown Libertarian after listening to his support of Paul's idea during the segment from Fox above.

CASONE: Imagine wiping our five government agencies from the map in Washington. That's what GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to do as part of his $1 trillion spending cut plan. He says it will get the American economy booming again. Okay, will it? Jonathan Hoenig, will it?

HOENIG: Cheryl it will, I mean, government spent $3.8 trillion last year. We don't need a little tweak, we need a slash and burn, and Rep. Paul's program does just that. We've come to think of this bloated government as something normal, but it's really not. You know, Housing and Urban Development was a product of the 1960's. The Energy Department which he wants to get rid of was a product of the 1970's. We should slash and burn, return to the Constitution, put this country back on a course for economic prosperity.

After fellow panelist Wayne Rogers pointed out that those agencies employ 235,000 people and have a budget of $175 billion, it's unrealistic to think that the Congress is just going to dismantle them and that making cuts to those agencies would be a more realistic approach, Casone asked the lonely Fox “liberal” on the panel, Regina Calcaterra to weigh in. As she pointed out, Paul's plan does a whole lot of damage to everyday working Americans that Hoenig apparently wasn't that concerned about.

CALCATERRA: It also substantially reduces funding for preschool programs for impoverished kids. It reduces funding for food stamps. And it wholeheartedly eliminates the Community Policing Program, which was put in place in the 1990's, which led to a substantial decrease in crime nationwide. So you look at what programs he's proposing to cut here, and they're going to be cut in low community incomes and while he's doing this, he's also saying he wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, he wants to repeal all tax income on investment income and on estates and like you said, he wants to repeal wholeheartedly, without even looking at the merits some of the issues relating to Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. And those two laws were put into place because of the bad actors on Wall Street...

At which point she got shouted down by the rest of the panel on the show.

Tracy Byrnes followed with a little screed, carping about how the politicians in Washington are wasting our money, which I don't disagree with, but certainly not for the same reasons Byrnes was going ballistic over here. She goes on to say that “no one even knows what the Department of the Interior does, and for all we know, they decorate, which was thankfully rebutted by their lonely "liberal" a bit later in the segment.

CALCATERRA: It's also going to affect the employees nationwide. You're just looking at the salaries of the administrators sitting behind desks in Washington, but when you cut the Department of Interior, which doesn't have to do with interior design, it actually has to do with national parks and a controlled oil drilling and federal parks as well, you've got park rangers and you've got people operating that that don't make over a hundred thousand dollars...

After which Tracy Byrnes started talking over her again and screaming again about how we'd better get rid of all the federal employees working “useless jobs.” To which Calcaterra managed to get a word in edgewise and point out that regulators at the federal level are necessary when you look at what happened with BP and the disaster in the Gulf.

After Hoenig got a chance to make one one last comment at the end of the segment, talking about how wonderful Ron Paul's ideas are for our country, Calcaterra got one last shot in at him as well for “cutting our funding for poor kids.” Which was met by moans and groans from the rest of them as the time for the segment ran out.



Get Adobe Flash player

DOWNLOADS: (4792)
Download WMV Download Quicktime
PLAYS: (4635)
Play WMV Play Quicktime
Embed

When Michael Moore comes to Wisconsin to speak out against the amount of income disparity we have in the United States that we've not seen since the Gilded Age, leave it to the yappers on Fox to go crazy and call him every name in the book, and to also insist that he's picking on the so called "job creators" in America. Someone tell me that these idiots weren't just reading straight off of the pages of Atlas Shrugged for Fox "news" with this breathless defense of how we're not supposed to pick on the rich by asking them to pay more in taxes.

According to Jonathan Hoenig here, Moore is preaching Communism and a society of... get this... "slavery" and the rich should be paying even less in taxes. Because heaven forbid we can't ask the rich to pay more or we're going to turn into Venezuela or Cuba or some other country that he wants to make completely irrational and ridiculous comparisons to. These people make my head hurt. Up is down and black is white on Fox.

Here's more from Michael that they were up in arms about.

VIDEO: America Is NOT Broke:

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic -- and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

Here's Michael in Wisconsin.



Get Adobe Flash player

DOWNLOADS: (752)
Download WMV Download Quicktime
PLAYS: (2009)
Play WMV Play Quicktime
Embed

Oh what a lovely bunch we've got here. Fox's weekend carry over from their sister network Fox Business, Cashin' In hosted a panel segment on the problem we have with long term unemployment. Apparently the problem is not as Susie rightfully noted that we don't have enough jobs to go around. No... the lazy unemployed bums just don't want to get off of their couches as long as they're still collecting those checks. They ask if making the unemployed pay those benefits back later might solve the problem. Yeah, that'll solve the problem. Let's squeeze some more nonexistent blood from that turnip.

How about a discussion on how to create jobs that doesn't involve the words "tax cuts" from you cretins?

And the apparently soulless Jonathan Hoenig thinks that the government shouldn't offer unemployment benefits at all, which absolutely stunned Charlie Gasparino who couldn't believe Hoenig actually thought that. Yeah, let's just have people starving in the streets immediately after losing their jobs. That's the ticket. Who needs a safety net?

When Julian Epstein attempted to point out as Susie did in her post that due to outsourcing and our rotten economy we've got some real structural problems with having enough jobs available to put Americans back to work, he was immediately shouted over by the other guests on the panel and cut off by the host. Heaven forbid we can't have anyone pointing out the real reasons for our unemployment numbers.

I've got to wonder how long shows like this that feed off of racial animosity are going to start finding diminishing returns with hating on the poor. This might play well when we're close to full employment and you want to get some employed white guy to resent the lazy dirty brown person who's sucking off of the government teet in his view, but when we've got unemployment numbers as high as they are now, everyone knows someone out of work. And it's your family, your friends, your neighbors and not just the scary black person that they want to demonize and dehumanize with their divide and conquer class warfare game. How long can they keep this up before it's not just liberals who watch hate filled segments like this and see through the game they're playing and start getting angry at these pundits?



Fox, CNN Panels Attack Unions

Get Adobe Flash player

DOWNLOADS: (507)
Download WMV Download Quicktime
PLAYS: (229)
Play WMV Play Quicktime
Embed

From the little bit I've watched of that channel, I suppose this is what their viewers get treated to day after day on the Fox Business Channel. On Fox News' weekend show with some of the regulars from their sister network, Cashin' In, it was one big union bashing fest during this panel discussion with them opining over the horrors of union members helping people get out to vote for the mid-term elections and blaming them for the loss of jobs in the United States.

Yeah, it's those evil union workers that are to blame for the state of our economy. Never mind the CEO salaries, outsourcing, a race to the bottom with competing with cheap labor over seas and no willingness to fix our rotten trade laws that help encourage that behavior. Those workers who dare to want a living wage without having to work two or three jobs to get by and heaven forbid might want a pension so they can retire without living in poverty are destroying America.

And apparently free speech is great for large corporations, but if the unions want to help people or their members get out there to the polls, they're destroying democracy. And below from CNN's weekend show, Your Money, more of the same flame throwing from their weekend show two of my least favorite regulars on that show, Peter Morici and Stephen Moore.

Get Adobe Flash player

DOWNLOADS: (482)
Download WMV Download Quicktime
PLAYS: (252)
Play WMV Play Quicktime
Embed