Welcome to your Thursday open thread. What’s up today? I don’t know about you but I’m ready for winter to be over.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The Baltimore Orioles distanced themselves Wednesday from Luke Scott’s interview with Yahoo! Sports, with a team spokesman saying the outfielder’s comments do not reflect the opinion of the organization.
Scott gave a wide-ranging interview to the website’s baseball blog on Tuesday during which he said President Barack Obama “does not represent America” and he believes Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
“That’s my belief,” Scott told the website. “I was born here. If someone accuses me of not being born here, I can go – within 10 minutes – to my filing cabinet and I can pick up my real birth certificate and I can go, “See? Look! Here it is. Here it is.” The man has dodged everything. He dodges questions, he doesn’t answer anything. And why? Because he’s hiding something.”
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“Luke Scott’s comments do not reflect the opinion of the Baltimore Orioles organization,” team spokesman Greg Bader said Wednesday in an e-mail. “The fact is that Barack Obama is our President, duly elected by the people of the United States. End of story.”
It’s wrong to say teabaggers, because it hurts their delicate feelings.
So far the story on tax cuts has mostly been about the opposition from the left. Will stories like this one start to get more play?
Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now. On the whole, the tax cuts were arguably the one Bush administration policy at home that satisfied most conservatives, and if this continues to be true we will have confirmation of just how little conservatives are concerned about adding to the debt even now.
It is certainly true that the Tea Party movement opposes tax increases, but it is also supposed to be interested in bringing public debt under control. The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.
If history is any guide the GOP is eager to get back to it’s old ways. The first, second and third priorities were making sure rich people (AKA the base) got their tax cuts. The earmark ban lasted 3 whole days and a Congressman with the nickname “the prince of pork” (Hal Rogers R-KY) was selected head of Appropriations.