From the newest PPP poll of New Hampshire voters:
52% of GOP primary voters say they're offended by bilingual phone menus, to 40% who say they aren't. This is actually a big dividing line in the GOP race. Among voters who aren't offended by having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish, the race is tied with Rubio and Trump each at 19%, Bush at 14%, Kasich at 13%, Christie at 11%, and Cruz at just 6%. But among voters who are offended by such things, Trump leads with an overwhelming 36% to 13% for Cruz, 12% for Christie, 11% for Rubio, 8% for Kasich, and just 6% for Bush.
On the other hand:
20% of GOP primary voters in the state say they think Obama is going to take all Americans' guns away during his final year in office to 64% who think he will not. Rubio voters (29%) are actually most likely to have this belief followed by 25% of Trump's, 24% each of Cruz and Christie's, then all the way down to 10% of Kasich's and 9% of Bush's.
So Trump has a commanding lead with the people who get irate when confronted with a bilingual phone message, but Rubio’s got a bit of an edge among the considerably smaller group of people who believe Obama will have successfully taken everyone’s guns away before the next election.
Huh. I’ll admit I didn’t see that one coming.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—GOP Rides a Tall Stack of $20s:
Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House in 1981 with three major agenda items on his platter. Two of these were just like Mister Bush's 20 years later: greatly increase defense spending and slash taxes on the wealthy. He did both. But his greatest effort was devoted to cutting the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic new piles to play with. Thus did he start us down the road toward a Third World ratio between rich and poor.
Reagan achieved this defense boost and plutocratic tax reduction by borrowing more than all the presidents who had preceded him. That generated a bit of contradiction with the third item supposedly on his agenda: ending the annual budget deficit. At the time of his first inauguration, this hovered around $80 billion a year. The accumulation of past deficits—the national debt—was nearly a trillion dollars. That gave Reagan's speechwriters the focus for a powerful image for him to use in his first address to Congress in February 1981. He said:
I've been trying ... to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is. The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high. |
Like so many other things Reagan said, this wasn't true. A trillion-dollar stack of $1000 bills would measure just over 63 miles high. Since the last one was printed in 1945 and use of all large denomination bills was discontinued by the Treasury in 1969, most Americans have never seen a $1000 bill. What we're most familiar with are the $20 bills ATMs spit out. Reagan's image-makers missed the mark. A trillion-dollar stack of twenties would be an impressive 3150 miles high.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up 2016 jockeying, our daily Trump fix, and the quant’s view of the president’s action on guns. The New Year in GunFAIL. Joan McCarter says the House is back, and ready to waste our time again. Oh, and bail out VW for its cheating.
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