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ranks 15th out of 44 in a poll of the best and worst presidents while former President George W. Bush earns a place in the bottom five, according to the Siena College Research Institute's recent survey of 238 presidential scholars released Thursday
You're right. 238 presidential scholars don't have nearly the grasp on the US presidency that some posters on this thread possess. Much better to listen to the uninformed hyperpartisan drivel.
Where is it etched in stone that no Presidential scholar is immune to uninformed hyperpartisan drivel?
Any poll that attempts to rate BO at this point in time is junk anyways.
ranks 15th out of 44 in a poll of the best and worst presidents while former President George W. Bush earns a place in the bottom five, according to the Siena College Research Institute's recent survey of 238 presidential scholars released Thursday
You're right. 238 presidential scholars don't have nearly the grasp on the US presidency that some posters on this thread possess. Much better to listen to the uninformed hyperpartisan drivel.
Siena has a left wing bias, its results are always different from non-partisan rankings, such as that done by CSPAN. Look no further than the fact the bumped Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln out of the top 5 so they could put FDR on top. No professional ranking has ever done such a thing, and it is quite clear where Siena's interests lie.
By the way, Bush was ranked 19th by those Siena "scholars" after his first year in office.
Siena has a left wing bias, its results are always different from non-partisan rankings, such as that done by CSPAN. Look no further than the fact the bumped Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln out of the top 5 so they could put FDR on top. No professional ranking has ever done such a thing, and it is quite clear where Siena's interests lie.
Feel free to post your non-biased polls.
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By the way, Bush was ranked 19th by those Siena "scholars" after his first year in office.
In his first year, Bush hadn't yet invaded Iraq or ruined the economy.
Stealth technology was a pet project of Ford, not Carter. The F-117 project for example began in 1975, which is when most of the funding was produced.
Well, you may as well go back to Eisenhower if the original R&D trail is going to count. The first working mini-models of an F-117 weren't produced until 1977, and DOD's commitment to stealth (and the start of the major flow of funds into it) didn't come until the first production contracts were signed a year later. Prior to Carter, stealth was an interesting idea. It was Carter who wrote the policy that integrated it into our future.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
I can trace every single piece of smart-technology military equipment back to the 80s and Ronald Reagan's defense programs.
And the wheel can be traced back to cavemen, so the heck with Henry Ford. The Gulf War was a proof-of-concept for tne added cost of smart weapons. The tapes made public during the controlled coverage of that conflict were the not so consistent success stories of what was a small portion of the actual ordnance used. By contrast, better than two-thirds of all explosions in the shock-and-awe treatment of Afghanistan and Iraq came from second and third generation precision-guided weapons designed, tested, and built under Clitnon. GPS-guided Tomahawk cruise missles and drones such as Predator and Global Hawk were Clinton-era additions to the arsenal for example, but the most significant changes came out of force integration and linkage to intelligence operations and information that a trillion dollar Clinton investment in smart-weapons and IT-related protocols brought about. Nobody was sitting at a remote console directing real-time airstrikes based on live communications from the battlefield in 1991. Clinton made that and a lot more possible.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
From 1991-2002 our military technology changed very little. Aside from orders that were filled from Reagan administration projects, very little new equipment was pursued. It was one of Clinton's campaign promises that he would not expand our military or begin any new projects.
Campaign promises don't really count for much. Bush-43 for example whined in 2000 about how the military was overstretched, putting unfair burdens on military families and harming morale and recruitment efforts. Look how that turned out. Clinton meanwhile spent more and spent smarter than HW Bush had. He basically brought the military into the age of the information superhighway. The results were evident in the unprecedented quickness, precision, and efficiency that were put on display in 2002 and 2003. Bush made war with the military Bill Clinton handed to him.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
Bravo sierra! 1997 was the first year of the housing bubble. This is not my opinion, but the result of economist consensus.
I'm one of those, and I'm laughing at it.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
The source was a special tax exemption not for the rich, but for ordinary middle class Americans. It allowed you to defer capital gains tax on your home up to $500,000 for couples or half of that for singles.
Under prior law, capital gains taxes were deferred if you used the proceeds from the sale of one primary residence to purchase another, which of course is exactly what most people did. That led to a flat-out $125,000 exclusion once you reached age 55, which at that time was still serious money. In essence, no one but the very wealthy was paying capital gains tax on the sale of a primary residence even before the TRA of 1997.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
...housing prices began to inflate as a result.
No, they didn't. In fact, prices eased as compared to the prior two years.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
Rock bottom interest rates beginning in 2001 only exasperated the problem, lead by the same man who was the so called "wizard" behind the 90s economy (Alan Greenspan).
Greenspan felt he had no choice after Bush's Tax Cuts for the Rich had failed to produce any significant increase in economic activity. Corporate profits were certainly healthy, but the rest of the economy remained stagnant. Freezing the fed funds rate at near zero levels was indeed a key factor in the evolution of the credit crisis, but God saw no other way of trying to assist Bush's faltering "efforts" at the time.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
Maybe, maybe not. But Clinton should have taken a hint from the first WTC bombings that it was time to stop ignoring terrorism and radical Islam. He routinely dodged the problem even after the 1998 embassy bombings, vowing to chuck a few missiles at a few tents in Afghanistan and be done with it.
Baloney. The first WTC bombing occurred 37 days after Clinton was inaugurated. He had inherited no organized counter-terrorism infrastructure from Bush-41. He had to create it himself and did, bringing billions of dollars per year to bear on the issue for the first time. Those "few missiles" are meanwhile to this day the closest anyone has come to bin Laden, all sorts of phony bravado about hunting him down and smoking him out having gone for absolutely nothing. Bush-43 in fact back-burnered terrorism as an issue upon taking office and then simply walked away from the Cole attack. It took 9/11 to bring the problem to his attention.
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
The same Taliban that had religious gestapo that beat people in the street for something as simple as a a crooked turban? The same Taliban that practiced the strictest interpretations of Sharia law in the entire Middle East? The same Taliban that sanctioned beating women regularly for no other reason than being a woman? Denying women the right to vote, not allowing them to go to school, disallowing them from working, or even showing anything but their face in public (sounds eerily like Saudi Arabia)?
Yes, that Taliban. The one that was already known for examples of what you describe. So, Massoud or Hekmatyar? Which would you have had us pack in with instead?
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Originally Posted by Frankie117
I know you defend Democrats vehemently even when they are in the wrong, but you will have to do better than that.
I defend the sense of sensible actions and policies, while attacking the nonsense of nonsensical actions and policies. If Democrats are more often associated with the former and Republicans more often with the latter, that's the way the cookie is going to crumble. Unfortunately, Republicans have a terrible record on foreign policy. And on domestic policy. And on nearly every one of their component policies. Thirty years of making matters worse. That's about the extent of the legacy that Republicans bring to the table.
Well, then he certainly let some bad boys borrow his library card, because it was in great shape when he came in and one god-awful mess when he left.
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