Well…just a short comment on the decision by the president to continue to “evolve” his views on gay marriage to the point that he now supports it and all I can say is “it’s about time”. It’s about time that millions of our fellow citizens don’t have to hide anymore…it’s about time that everyone in this country has the same rights as everyone else…and, it’s about time that we tell the homophobes on the right that our gay and lesbian friends are no different than we are…they want the same chance to be happy in a committed relationship with the benefits of marriage…they want to be able to go to the hospital and visit their loved ones and not be shunted aside since they have no legally recognized relationship….especially here in Michigan where this discrimination has been codified into our constitution…and needs to be removed as soon as possible. This is the fundamental difference between the parties in this election; one party wants to continue the historical duty of a democracy to extend the rights of that democracy to more and more people while the other, the repubs, try to do their best to limit the rights of citizenship to only those that agree with them and over the past decade or so, have done their best to disenfranchise everyone but them….I hope that time is over and those of us who believe that deriving the benefits of citizenship should become easier over time…not harder and harder as the repubs do. I know that just having the president come out in favor of this civil right will not automatically tear down the roadblocks the repubs have built…but, I find it heartening that Obama has found a spine finally and has said enough to the right…now it’s up to us to support him at the ballot box to make this a better country…
Category Archives: Politics
Ole Mitt is still delusional…
Well…I just have to hand it to ole Mitt and his chutzpah over the past few days, trying to take credit for the success of the auto bailout….yep, the guy who famously said “let them go bankrupt” is now taking credit like he was the one who provided the money and the guts to save 3 million jobs in the auto industry…what a load of crap! What ole Mitt wanted was for the companies to go through what he did to other companies while he was at Bain…that is for them to shed all of the middle class, union jobs, replacing them (or not replacing them) with many, many fewer, low paying jobs so his vulture cronies could come in, destroy the companies while piling up billions in fees that would go to the 1%. So, if ole Mitt can take credit for the bailout, shouldn’t I be able to say the same thing since I advocated some form of restructuring a few years back? Let’s remember one thing here….that restructuring takes money, money that was not even available to high profit companies like GE during the financial meltdown…something that ole Mitt is conveniently forgetting…that the government was the lender of last resort and that there just was NO private money for the process. What a liar…..
Another reason to send ole Mitt back where he came from….
Well…have been reading a few of the online papers this morning and a theme has emerged…one that I have taken on a couple of times before in regard to Michigan but this time it is on a national scale…and deals with the cluelessness of the rich in this country and of the Romney family in particular. As you know, one of my favorite sayings about the rich is that “they were born on third base but think they hit a triple to get there”…and that applies here to one of ole Mitt’s sons, Tagg, who has shown this same blindness to the advantages of being born rich in this country, and can’t figure out why everyone isn’t rich. The particular delusion of this young man centers on the establishment of a private equity fund that was started with one of Mitt’s primary fundraisers, and guess who one of the first “investors” was? His mom, of course, followed by over 60 of his father’s buddies and cronies who “invested” almost 250 million dollars in this fund…this, with Tagg having absolutely no experience in finance but, to hear ole Tagg explain it, it was because of his “excellent strategies” not because his father is Mitt and was planning on running for president in 2012. Delusions, delusions, delusions….and the crony capitalism we will see with a Romney presidency…look how well that worked out under ole GW. Haven’t we had enough of this nonsense? Haven’t we had enough of people getting a free ride in life because of their connections? I can pretty much bet that you and I couldn’t raise 250 million dollars from 60 or so of our friends….geez….
What are they thinking?
Well…just a short one about what is happening in Indiana with the repubs and the fact that the tea partiers are primarying Senator Dick Lugar and it looks like he is going to lose. The shame about this is that the TP is using one of his strengths, the fact that he will reach across the aisle and work with the dems, against him, and with the idiots that are the TP, they are going to throw one of the most accomplished senators out for a moron that has never accomplished anything. I probably shouldn’t be concerned about this since, if Lugar loses, the dem candidate will probably win what was a secure seat for the repubs. This just shows you the trajectory that the repub party is on…that unless you are just as unreasonable and stupid as the TP, you have no place there….that if you really want to make a better America, you have no place there….I can see the collapse of the repubs coming…and with the TP pulling the strings, it can’t come too soon…geez…
Just some nonsense…
Well…there really is nothing going on in politics that I want to comment on right now except the nonsense that is going on with the repubs…and I know what your question is going to be: “it’s all nonsense with the repubs so what is different now?”….on a scale of 1 to 10 this one would just be a three or so but here it is…the big deal that is going on is concerned with where the hotel rooms are for the Michigan delegation to the repub convention…since this delegation has been given a block of rooms that are near Romney’s, the speculation has arisen that our governor, Rick Snyder, is going to be the vice president pick. It’s as I told you, there is just not much going on in politics so the news outlets have to pick up on this stuff….but, they are wrong…Snyder is nowhere near conservative enough for the repub electorate to stomach…you read it here first…Snyder will not be the VP pick for the repubs….what a slow news day….geez….
One last thing…and something I have been talking about for a while….that because of the austerity measures that were forced on the country by the repubs, we have seen job growth come to a standstill with the report that is out today…Keynes is proven right again and if I were Obama, I’d be attacking the repubs on just this issue…and using Europe as the bad example not to follow while their jobs growth is even worse with the extreme austerity they have practiced…
Hold the victory laps here in Michigan….
Well…there has been a new theme that has surfaced in the repub talking points here in Michigan that is audacious to say the least, or just another incidence of the repubs taking credit for the recovery that they had no hand in. You decide. This latest theme or story, tries to tell the narrative that it is only the repub policies of cutting taxes for business, and raising them for everyone else that is responsible for the nascent recovery here in Michigan and that we should continue these policies or we will fall back into recession. I can’t even name how many ways this is wrong, but I’ll give a couple a try. First, it’s never been proven and it has never been documented that one job was ever created by tax cuts for business….especially in an environment where corporate cash on hand and profits are at the highest level in history…so, they won’t invest with a billion dollars on hand but they will if they have 1.25 billion on hand? the whole story is demand, demand, demand….and if middle class wages continue to fall, demand will fall along with it. Second, most of the job growth here in Michigan has been in and related to the recovery of the auto industry that the repubs vehemently opposed and still do….so now, they take credit that their policies resulted in this recovery? Just another instance where the repubs will do or say anything; counting on the electorate to have no memory at all of history or the truth. I guess it’s up to me to remind people….geez…
Some musings about Wisconsin…
Well….there have been some things happening in Wisconsin that I wanted to comment on today starting with the new polls that are out today showing that the likely challenger to ole Walker is leading in the polls…a small lead to be sure, but still in a lead in spite of the huge amount of outside money that has come into the race. Over the past couple of weeks ole Scott’s billionaire buddies, starting with the Koch brothers, have spent over 13 million dollars trying to keep this idiot in office and all it’s done is to make his approval ratings continue their downward slide. This is one thing that I find so repugnant about the big money that supports this guy and other repubs like him across the country…they will spend countless millions trying to influence the vote to install their radical right-wing agenda…but when it comes to paying their fair share of taxes to allow us to start to repair our infrastructure and educate our children, they are nowhere to be seen. So, this is one to watch over the next month, to see if we can start to take back democracy from the people who think that those who work for a living are just numbers on a balance sheet…not people that are just trying to live and raise their families in the face of this onslaught of the rich…geez….
The new do-nothing republicans…
Well….it has been an interesting time since the repubs took control of the House in 2010 and this congress is shaping up to be one of the most do-nothing congresses in the history of the country. Where are the jobs bills that will help put people back to work? Where are the infrastructure projects that will start to repair our crumbling country? Where are the forward thinking ideas that will help us compete in the future economy? The answer is nowhere…since it would go against the repubs stated goal of tearing down the government that is so “intrusive”…do they really believe that the private sector will take up the slack and build and repair the bridges, roads, and rural high speed internet that the country needs to prosper? This is the first time in my long life that I see this country going backward led by a party that, when you really take a long look, wants the country to fail for purely political gain and can’t see past party to do what’s right for all of us, not just their large donors. Maybe it’s a good thing that the House is not doing anything since the ideas they bring to the table are so far out of the mainstream that they would be laughable if the press would just say so….let’s remember that the repubs are the party of can’t do, who would like nothing better than to use policy to cement our status as an also-ran country while they profess to protect traditional values…the traditional values of the US are innovation, leadership, and inclusiveness…just the opposite of what the modern repub party stands for…geez….
Maybe the tide is turning….
Well…it has been a while since I really had something to say about politics and you might say I’ve never had anything to say about it but I have to disagree….there was an interesting article last week in the WAPO by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that elaborated on what I have been saying for a couple of years now…that there is not any equivalence between the radicalism on the right and left…..even though the media, in some misguided paen to fairness, has been treating them as the same; that the dems are as responsible for the poisonous politics that now rule in Washington when it is just not true….in instance after instance, it has been the right who has held the country hostage to their radical, crazy worldview…I think one of my favorite passages in the article goes like this “the republicans are unmoved by the conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science…” sounds like willful ignorance to me, where faith trumps facts and political gain is placed above all else…even the good of the country. So, we may be seeing the first cracks in the wall of lies that the right has used to dupe the middle class into voting for them…my fear is that they have done such a good job demonizing “facts” that we may already be lost….geez….
Just a couple of things…
Well…I did have a couple of comments to make and wanted to make them before I forget so here goes…there was an interesting article in the WAPO today that makes the clear and evident point that the dysfunction in Washington today is the repubs fault and the false equivalence that the right tries to make that the left is just as responsible is laid to rest by a clear argument…one that I have made here more than a year ago…but it is nice when your ideas get confirmed by other writers….you should go there and read it…I think they even do a better job that I have…the next thing I wanted to say is about the dustup that Paul Ryan had with the Catholic bishops and others in the Catholic church when he claimed that his proposed draconian cuts to the social safety net fit with Catholic teachings…at least the way he sees it….but the bishops landed on him with two feet and in no uncertain terms told him he was dead wrong…that giving tax cuts to the rich and corporations and paying for them by cutting every program that doesn’t benefit the rich is not what the Bible teaches…but, as the overly self assure repubs do, ole Paul kept up his attacks saying that he was a better judge of the teachings of the church on social justice than the bishops are….what a huge load of hubris from this idiot….geez….