Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and their family attended a reenlistment and promotion ceremony onboard the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) on Sunday, June 10, 2012 (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Maria Rachel D. Melchor/Released) USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77)
Today is the 88th birthday of former President George Herbert Walker Bush. He spent Sunday with his wife Barbara, and son, former President George W Bush, and his wife Laura, aboard the USS George H W Bush (CVN-77), for a promotion and re-enlistment service. The photo above, and several others, come from the Facebook page of the younger President Bush.
The elder President Bush remained seated for all of the ceremonies, and was in a wheelchair when he attended the service unveiling his son’s official portrait at the White House. A vigorous man into his eighties, he is now looking frail.
Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George Bush served as a torpedo bomber pilot aboard the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) during World War II; he was the youngest aviator in the Navy at the time, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Naval Air Medal, the latter award thrice.
Happy birthday, President Bush!
George HW Bush is a true American hero. Y’know, he actually saw combat, risked his hide, and then went on to further serve his country and became quite successful. However, creeps like Passive-Aggressive Perry would dub Mr. Bush as “unpatriotic” and “un-American” for the policies he’s advocated … even though, again, Mr. Bush (like our own Hoagie) actually fought for the defense of this nation — ate dirt, risked his very hide. He didn’t join up just so he could roam the streets of Tokyo and take a lot of pictures, so that later in life he could denigrate in the worst possible terms fellow servicemen who actually fought because their politics are different from his own.
Koolo, you are an unbelievably nasty and hateful person, unworthy even of the title “Conservative Republican”! Unreal!
Is that so? Are you finally beginning to understand how we feel about your comments now? Maybe? Huh?
If not, then your response above is 100% completely meaningless … until you take a long, hard look in that proverbial mirror.
I saw a former Democrat candidate for President (who was a Democrat darling for a long time) in your comment, Koolo. I very clearly saw him in your comment, that rat bastich.
I remember when GHWB took his second parachute jump. He commented he did like the first time he jumped in WW2 in the South Pacific.
I find it quite interesting that President Bush-41, when he inherited a recession from his predecessor, took a tack similar to the one President Obama tried to incorporate for his inherited Great Recession, which worked for him, but treasonous Republicans prevented President Obama from doing essentially the same thing, due to their unquenchable thirst to retake power. These unpatriotic renegade extremists were willing to see the middle and poor Americans suffer, and worse than that, their solution is the Ryan Plan of austerity, currently a major failure in Europe. There is no rationale to their policies.
The whole story is right here!
And by the way, President GHW Bush, was/is a decent man who worked across the aisle, and should be looked at as such, compared to this current crop of Republican extremists, exemplified on this very blog.
Ask President Clinton what he thinks of GHW Bush. They are friends, a relic of past Republicans, not an ounce of which can be seen today, like long time Republican Senator Richard Lugar, another decent person shoved aside by partisan extremists supported by contributors to this blog, who seem happy to make a basket case out of the country for which they proclaim allegiance, falsely!
Sheesh! Let’s wish the old boy well on his birthday and say a few nice words about the former President’s long and distinguished career in public service before the same recurring animosities reduce this thread to the tiresome back and forth which characterizes so many otherwise interesting topics here.
Although I’m often one of offenders, today it was Koolo who threw the first punch, and it wasn’t long before Perry retaliated and in the process took a cheap shot at Conservative Republicans.
Which only gave credence to Koolo’s often repeated description of Perry as a passive/aggressive name-calling racist jerk who knowingly twists facts, lies, and distorts the historical record at will in order to advance anti-American left-wing talking points and to misrepresent GOP policies and initiatives, while at the same time egarly denigrating Conservative personalities.
I started out to call for more focus on topics and less on the sins of commenters, but alas, Perry’s record of disingunuious arguement and his habit of resorting to personal threats overcame my good intentions.
Now, I’m not ignoring Perry’s contributions, they are many and they are often enough thought-provoking and worthy of considered response, however, the other side of the coin is those contributions too often come loaded down with ugly, divisive baggage and are clearly unworthy of anything but condemnation.
Let’s deal with important issues, ropelight, like increasing the minimum wage!
WW wrote:
I guess that we can add yet another link where WW calls those who disagree with President Obama “treasonous.”
However, the “treasonous Republicans” weren’t able to prevent President Obama from getting his stimulus plan through; it passed, remember? It passed, it went into effect, it became the law, and the only thing that it didn’t do was work.
There have, of course, been nations in which people opposed to the Leader were considered “treasonous,” but somehow I didn’t think that the United States was one of them; I’m sure it wasn’t when President Bush was in office.
Perhaps our Democrat from Delaware thinks we should have an oath like:
WW whined:
Senator Lugar was denied renomination by the voters, just as the actual voters replaced several other moderate Republicans — and many Democrats — in 2010. We are a democratic representative republic, and that means that, in the end, the voters decide.
Of course, you were quite happy with the decisions of the voters in 2006 and 2008, and I’m sure you absolutely supported their rights to take the decisions that they did; now that things aren’t going your way, they’re just “partisan extremists.”
The voters have seen the obvious: stimulus plans haven’t been working, and piling up mountains of debt only drag down the country in the future. I’d add that it has been those past stimulus plans, under both Republicans and Democrats, which have made future stimulus plans less effective: we have piled up so much debt due to those past stimulus plans that adding more debt via future stimulus plans weakens the stimulus effect promised. Even if the stimulus plans give the economy a quick boost, that boost is consumed by the additional debt service. Since that debt is increasingly foreign-owned, that quick boost winds up being sent overseas, leaving our economy and not providing the benefits of the stimulus you thought you’d get.
We have had many quick stimulus plans, and they have worked as an innoculant: we have managed to vaccinate the economy from the effect of future stimulus plans!
An increase in the minimum wage will put more people out of work while corrupt union contracts use any increase as a springboard to pump-up their already outrageously greedy pay and benefit packages.
Perry, if the minimum wage was increased, would your own compensation go up as a result?
That’s cause no one wants to be friends with Obama, the arrogant narcissist with his chin jutting way up in the air. I don’t even think Bill Clinton likes him.
WW wrote:
To do what? In the end, people can only be paid for their production, and just increasing the dollar amount that they are paid means that the prices charged for the goods and services they provide must be increased; that’s simple inflation. It doesn’t make the minimum wage earners any wealthier, in real terms, as it simply means that they wind up paying higher prices for the things that they have to buy.
Of course, inflation would make your Editor wealthier, in real terms. As his salary increased, and prices did as well, he would still have a mortgage that is dollar-denominated, and that would stay the same, meaning it would shrink in real terms. Since little of our wealth is actually in cash, our wealth would appreciate with inflation.
But, if your Editor would do well, a lot of other people would not. retired people who depend on dollar-denominated savings would see their wealth decline, in real terms. Seniors who had paid off their homes, but are still responsible for property taxes, would see the value of their homes appreciate, meaning that their property tax bills would increase, but the value of their savings would decrease in real terms, and they’d be poorer, and perhaps have to sell out.
Inflation helps people with outstanding loans, but hurts those with savings in cash.
No, but unemployment would. There’s a reason the minimum wage is set at about the same level teenagers make for flipping burgers, because if they set it any higher, people would start losing jobs.
Eric wrote:
The last time the minimum wage was increased, it had very little effect, because it had been so long since the previous one that almost no one was making the official minimum wage: even places like McDonald’s were in the $7.00 an hour range, because they just couldn’t get anyone to show up for work for less than that. We had found a real “economic minimum” which was different from the official minimum wage.
The following excerpt is from a National Buereau of Economic Research Summary Report by Janice Houston dated August 30, 2005. It examines the impacts of a minimum wage increase for The Center for Public Policy and Administration. (emphasis added)
While that may have been true in your neck of the woods, there were a great many minimum wage jobs in my stomping grounds. Fast food, grocery store baggers, farm labor, and others. What increasing the minimum wage does, aside from getting people laid off and harming businesses and causing artificial inflation, is it sucks up the people who used to have above-minimum-wage jobs. They become minimum wage, too, as their pay doesn’t go up to keep pace. It makes everyone poorer.
Today, The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halpers reports
Currently 18 states have minimum wage laws in excess of the current $7.25/hr federal standard. Most of these are Western and Northeastern states.
Oregon has the highest minimum wage, currently $8.80/hr, adjustable for inflation. Their unemployment rate is only slightly above 8.2%, at 8.5%.
Vermont has a minimum wage of $8.83/hr, and an unemployment rate of 4.6%.
36 of our 50 states have unemployment rates at or lower than the current national average of 8.2%, and many have minimum wages above the federal standard.
So some of the opinions stated above are simply not necessarily true.
I think it is fair to conclude that an increase in the minimum wage, say to $7.75/hr, would have little effect on unemployment rates. And note well, even $7.75/hr is below the poverty level for a 40 hour work week.
Ohio’s minimum wage is higher than Federal minimum wage. And, prior to Kasich, Ohio was sucking terribly. Post-Kasich-election, Ohio has done a “severe” turnaround, just as Wisconsin has done, post-Walker-election.
Perry has absolutely no understanding of anything involving people living outside the North Atlantic States region, so Perry’s claims to “know things” just isn’t so. Or, to paraphrase the Greatest President Of The 20th Century, it’s not that Democrats don’t know anything, it’s just that they know so much stuff that just isn’t true.
By the way, Perry, let me say this so you can see it.
All minimum wage jobs should be clearly below poverty level, in every country.
I’ll let you figure out the logic behind that statement, even though I know you have absolutely no use for logic, nor will you ever even attempt an honest understanding of that statement, as you live in emotional la-la land with the rest of the Socialists.
By the by, Perry, FOX News is owned by a corporation that puts more of its political money into Democrat coffers than Republican coffers, but since their political money is “Fair and Balanced”, obviously they are “extremists” and “right-wing” and “the enemy” and whatever else unthinking emotionalist radical Leftists/Socialists like yourself want to label them.
EDIT: Due to hard-code restrictions to all outside the Editorial Board, I had to log in to force the comment code to fit what I had originally posted.
There’s a reason, Perry, that the minimum wage isn’t $15/hour, because it would drive unemployment through the roof, and everyone knows it.
Yeah well,
One wonders then, what Perry meant in practical terms when he envisioned Obama saving the country by playing dictator. What kind of dictatorial acts was he foreseeing? Maybe like the trade negotiations Obama’s administration has been involved in and which were meant to subvert American law in their realization? Or perhaps Eric Holder’s refusal to testify on Kagan’s involvement with Obama-care before her appointment to the Supreme Court??
“To save the country, Obama will be foreclosing a second term.”
Dictators seem to find a way around that as part of their modus as “dictators”.