Jump to content
The Education Forum

Andrew Prutsok

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    661

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Andrew Prutsok

    The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

    in Political Discussions

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Steve Thomas said:

    Andrew,

    I believe that Clinton was rewarded with the Presidency for what he allowed to go on in Mena.

    I read once, that at one time, Mena was the busiest airport in the world.

    I lived in McAlester, OK for about three years in the late 80's.

    Steve Thomas

    I was blissfully unaware of the Mena conspiracy when I lived there. It wasn't until early in the 2000s that I read up on that. I'm not sure how busy the airport was, but it was certainly large with big planes in and out. It's hard to  imagine something like that being in a place so small and remote.

    The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

    in Political Discussions

    Posted

    46 minutes ago, Richard Price said:

    Andrew, maybe I'm not partisan enough, but I have watched and listened to Joe Manchin many times and he seems a dedicated conservative Democrat.  I have not studied his career extensively, but I have no problem with his standing for his ideals and not leaning far to the left.  I think we need many more like him.  I could be, and probably am wrong, but that is the way I always thought members of the Congress and Senate should act.  He is strong on his convictions, yet able to compromise to reach a middle ground in order to produce results.  That in my mind is how a Senator or congressman should govern.  Those who see everything completely black or white miss a lot of shades in between.  When you are dealing with thousands or millions of constituents, there are many shades of being a Democrat or a Republican.  If I remember correctly, JFK railed against those who wanted to "label" everyone and put them inside an immovable cage thereby removing them from the ability to learn and grow as their experience grew.

    As an aside, as a citizen of Georgia, I am relieved and hopeful that we will now have two Senators who are actually forward thinking progressives and not just "follow the [DEAR] leader" shills.

    I'd like to think you're right, Richard. I grew up in West Virginia. When I started my career reporting news there in the early 80s I covered his father, A. James Manchin, extensively. I lived and worked in the same county they lived in for a while and spent a good deal of time with him, long enough for him to give me a jar of his homemade wine. He was a flamboyant, Huey Long-type figure who had a wide following. He served as secretary of state but never got beyond that office because of Jay Rockefeller and Arch Moore trading the governorship back and forth for 25 years or so. I was a fan.

    The reason I'm skeptical of Manchin the Younger arise from some shenanigans involving his daughter while he was governor and her degree from West Virginia University along with her executive position with Merck. It's a long and convoluted story.

    But also, West Virginia is a place where Democrats go to die these days. Manchin won in 2016 with less than 50 percent of the vote (He got 60 percent his first run in 2010). That same year, the governor that was elected there as a Democrat with less than 50 percent of the vote. He quickly switched his party affiliation to make him more palatable to voters. Manchin is young enough to want his career to continue. He's up for re-election in 2022 and if staying in office is his goal, a party switch is probably not a bad move. Coal is everything to many of the people in West Virginia. When it thrives, other businesses thrive. Any talk of a Green New Deal in the Senate would be bad news for Manchin. I don't think he would have any choice but to switch parties should he want to stay in the body.

    The elder Manchin, by the way, gained famed in the early 70s via his campaign to clean up litter in West Virginia. I can still remember a poster  hanging in my grade school with him standing among a pile of trash with his quote on the poster:  "Let us purge our proud peaks of these jumbled jungles of junkery."

    The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

    in Political Discussions

    Posted · Edited by Andrew Prutsok

    You are right in that I am in a pickle with a red readership. People have been dropping subs at a pretty fast clip since the election, complaining that our AP news is fake. I’ve tried really hard to find something, anything, to say about him that is not laced with curses.

    While his motivations may be different than what I’ve posed, I fully believe the current deal is a POS and that Trump is the only person who can make it better for people who are hurting. I don’t care if he’s doing it out of pure spite. Pelosi’s not going to do anything. She settled for half of what Republicans offered a month ago and claimed the relief it provides is substantial, when it clearly is not. Nobody was even talking about $2,000 until he butted in.

    And, to be clear, I said his instincts have worked for him, which they have until last month. I never said they were good for the country.

     

     

     

    The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

    in Political Discussions

    Posted

    I wrote this editorial in my paper Friday urging Trump to do the very thing he did. 

     

    President Trump’s instincts are correct and he should follow them

     

    Word Friday morning was that Congress was near a deal on approving a new stimulus package before heading home for the holidays.

    The deal stinks and it’s a testament to the dysfunction that is the United States Congress that this deal — that gives individuals a paltry $600 and a minor temporary bump in unemployment benefits along with some aid to small business and money for vaccine distribution — is the best that our elected representatives can come up.

    This at a time when the economic recovery has stalled and signs are emerging that it’s actually getting worse. 

    Weekly unemployment claims are back up around 1 million (The all-time record was around 600,000 prior to the pandemic); it was announced this week that holiday retail sales in November — at a time most retailers depend on to make or break their year — were in the toilet; and a new analysis from researchers at the University of Chicago and University of Notre Dame estimates that nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since June — the biggest single-year spike in at least 60 years.

    Millions are already behind on their rent or mortgage payments and 1 in 6 adults who live with children said their households lacked sufficient food in the past week.

    The scale of the economic devastation the United States is suffering is staggering. The stimulus bill before Congress might help people for a few days, a few weeks at most.

    What’s more, in exchange for getting even the tiny amount of money directly to people, negotiators had to abandon aid to state and local governments in the proposed bill. Economists are predicting that most states and local governments will be in dire straits soon, if they aren’t already, due to high unemployment and declining retail sales and the resulting loss of sales and income tax revenue. This means teachers, firefighters, police officers, public health employees and others we depend on to keep society functioning properly, will have their jobs threatened without local tax increases or severe service cuts enacted.

    During the congressional negotiations, strange political bedfellows have emerged — Conservative Mo. Sen. Josh Hawley and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders who have joined forces to urge their colleagues to get Americans the help they need now.

    While it’s encouraging to see elected representatives set aside philosophical differences in the face of an emergency, that and $4 will get struggling Americans a cup of coffee. They, and the people of the country, need someone with real power and influence to join in the fight.

    On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump was on the verge of intervening in the House and Senate negotiations to lobby for a higher stimulus payment. The Post reported the president thought people needed a minimum of $1,200 and up to $2,000. Alas, his aides talked him out of taking action, apparently, for fear of “blowing up the negotiations.”

    With his iron grip on the Republican party, President Trump could make this happen, probably without much effort — a mere tweet could do the trick.

    The president is a politician who lives by his instincts, and those instincts have mostly served him well. In this instance, his instinct told him Americans are suffering and need a lot help. His instincts are correct in this case, too, and he should follow them.

    The sad part of this for the president is that he been making this case back in October instead of focusing almost entirely on Hunter Biden’s laptop, he likely would have breezed to re-election.

    With the likely end of his time in office approaching, the president could secure his legacy by following his instincts and doing what he knows is right — getting American citizens, small businesses, and state local governments the money they need now.

    The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

    in Political Discussions

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

    I found it on YouTube easily enough. I couldn’t agree more. Mr. Nice guy ain’t gonna work. Btw I’m sick of pundits repeating the mantra that the Dems will control the Senate if they win both Georgia Senatorial runoffs. It just ain’t true. They could control the Senate in that case, but they won’t hold together on anything remotely progressive. 
    I think David is right, if I’m understanding his point, when he points out the lack of political will, despite the rhetoric, of Democrats in the House. The compromise deal isn’t anywhere near enough, and waiting until after the election was cynical, and reveals some deep lack of concern for the working class. I know from personal experience that Nancy Pelosi is elitist, and that goes for many of her colleagues too. I’ve met John Kerry twice, and can paint him with the same elitist brush. 

    Mark Warner was dissing progressives on Fox last night.

    The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

    in Political Discussions

    Posted

    4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

    You found that amusing and enlightening Sandy? Kirk is being his usual xxxxx, which is why I have him on ignore, thanks for showing my why I keep him there.

    The reason its difficult to do a top ten for  any list is because although there are many histories and biographies of the most popular presidents--Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, Clinton--it is not easy to find ones on presidents who were less popular, but were fairly good presidents e.g. Arthur.  And as I said earlier, the ones on people like Truman and Eisenhower, by McCullough  and Ambrose for example, have turned out not to be reliable.  Which you probably did not know. In addition to the information about McCullough which I posted, Steve Ambrose, the main biographer of Eisenhower, turned out to be not just a plagiarist, but a confabulator.  That is, he made up interviews he did not do with Eisenhower.  The other problem is the declassification process. Blanche Wiesen Cook's book on Eisenhower--which you probably never heard of--did not come out until 1984. That began a reevaluation of Ike.

    With Kennedy, that problem does not exist so much because of the ARRB.  But, for example with your poster boy Obama, it does exist.  Obama tried to make a big deal out of his refusal to do HRC's bidding and invade Syria. The image was, well she suckered me on Libya, but yet I wised up after. He gave out a cover story to, I think, Atlantic on this. 

    Well, it turned out that as he was doing that, he OK'd Timber Sycamore, a rather large CIA covert operation against Syria.  I believe, and many others do also, that this was one of the stupidest, most pointless covert ops in recent memory.  As with W and Iraq, it has unleashed ethnic and tribal rivalries and hatreds that should have been foreseen. But as was par for the course, they were not. And the last thing they expected was for Putin to intervene. Which I think he was correct to do. Because, Putin anticipated another Libya happening. In fact, that is what would have happened if you examine what the Nusra Front really was. And we end up with things like Aleppo, where a city is destroyed in order to save it.

    The way you guys coddle DLC types like Obama and Clinton makes me wonder if you are already warming up to embrace Obama part 2, Joe Biden.  Let us see how long it takes Joe to get us out of Syria and to denounce what MBS is doing in Yemen, let alone for the murder of Khassoggi.

    I remember reading at the time that one of the drivers for Putin's action in Syria was to put the kibosh on a proposed gas line through there to Europe, not that there's anything wrong with that. It was my understanding that establishing this gas line so the US and it's dictator allies could provide Europe with an alternative to buying from Russia drove most of what Obama did in the Middle East.

×
×
  • Create New...