Well….I was going to append this one to the last one but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it deserved its own even though this one will be short…..does anyone else smell a rat with the precipitous drop in new private sector jobs last month? I think there was just too much good news coming out of the labor market, which would undoubtedly help Obama in the general election…so what do the friends of the repubs do that run most of the business in the US? They take one for the team and stop hiring to support the repub line that the economy still stinks and Obama should not be reelected. I normally don’t really support conspiracy theories, but the repubs are well known for rewarding businesses that give them money and support the party line (think Halliburton) and I would not put it past them that they are using all of the coercion and reward that they can to win the election…and those in business that will benefit the most from a repub president are all too happy to comply by hurting the economy and the middle class for their personal gain…geez…
Category Archives: Politics
A couple of things…
Well…have been watching some sports this aft so I haven’t really gotten my brain into the political gear that I need to make some sense of the things that I see happening…but, a couple of things have come up that I wanted to comment on…first, I thought it quite clever today when Obama described behaviors of Saint Ronald of Reagan that would have prevented him from even getting the nomination in today’s repub party…under full disclosure, I voted for Reagan… a mistake that I have had years to savor…what Obama was getting at was Reagan’s pragmatic approach to governance, and the fact that he advocated raising taxes on the rich to have them pay their “fair share” and this was at a rate that was more than 25% higher than it is now….if any repub these days even hints at wanting to do the sensible thing and combine budget cuts with tax increases to help decrease the deficit, they would be run out of town by the rabid tea partiers aided by ole Grover Norquist….it is kind of neat to see the shapes of the general starting to appear and I just can’t see how Romney can win after lurching so far to the right in the primary…alienating women, hispanics, independents, and everyone else except the extreme righties…..and there just is not enough of them to win a general election….can’t wait to see Karly Rove and his super pac spend a 100 million dollars and lose….geez…
A new twist on ACA…
Well….this is going to be a short one on some new study that was done by a repub who is a Medicare trustee saying that the ACA, or “Obamacare” will add 340 billion dollars to the deficit over 10 years…and I just love how the press has picked this nonsense up as “fact” when it is just another facet in the total war the repubs are waging on Obama…and they are hoping that throwing these huge, baseless numbers around will scare people into voting for the repubs in the fall…the only problem? The person who authored the study admits that he deviated from normal practices when doing his calculations…but he did say ‘trust me”, not the GAO or the CBO or any other agency that have run the numbers…but just trust me, my assumptions are correct and everyone else’s are wrong…an it is just a coincidence that my numbers are just what the rest of the repubs have been saying….how many times do we have to hear “trust us” from the repubs before we automatically know they are going to lie in the next breath….I’ve had enough, how about you? Geez….
I’m trying….
Well…it has been such a struggle lately to get these out but I am going to keep trying as long as it takes….I find it funny that the right has been taken aback now that Obama has figured them out and has started to fight back where he hoped for compromise in the past….and they are just screaming about his attack on the Ryan budget and the fact that he is using numbers against them…especially since they don’t believe in numbers at all, or they failed at math in high school, I’m not sure which. It is just like any bunch of bullies, when they get challenged, they sit there and try to turn the fault for the bullying back on the victim…but I’m not calling Obama a victim…he brought a lot of this bullying on himself by trying to compromise when the right had made it clear they would not compromise on anything….it’s like the right is surprised that he is not just rolling over and taking it and they don’t know how to react to it….being exposed as the party of no ideas must hurt…and I just love it…
Rick Santorum is still an idiot…
Well…read this little tidbit about comment that ole Rick made that quite a few of the colleges in California no longer even offer American history courses and cites this as “indoctrination” of students that keeps them from understanding America and it conservative roots….I am paraphrasing a little there…and maybe editorializing some, too….but the facts are that all of the colleges in California offer courses in American history…except one in the hotbed of liberalism that is San Francisco….and guess what that one school teaches? Yep…I’ll bet you guessed it’s a medical school, where everyone admitted already has a bachelor’s degree of some sort where they were required to take history as one of their requirements for the degree. How can this guy continue to be wrong all of the time and still be taken seriously? Geez….
Two in a row on the courts…
Well…just a short one about the latest destruction of your personal freedoms by this radical supreme court…if you haven’t heard, the supreme court this week said it is perfectly okay for anyone that is arrested, or ticketed, or has any other interaction with the police to be strip searched if the officers think it’s okay to do it. This includes getting stopped for not wearing a seatbelt, for eating on a subway train, for spitting on the sidewalk…do I need to go on? This whole nonsense again reveals the need to elect Obama again and tip the scales in the supreme court back to common sense…back to the individual liberty that the right reveres above else (or so they say) back to the ability of citizens of the country to be let alone…to have the police work for us and not assume that all of us are hardened criminals and get treated like one….I, for one, will be writing to my congresspeople to have this travesty rectified by a law that specifically prohibits this abhorrent practice and I hope you will to….this is a hell of lot worse than being required to buy health insurance…but we’ll see that struck down as being a threat to liberty…..how much more crazy can this court get? It’s time to impeach at least two of these idiots and restore the integrity of the court….
More partisan nonsense from a right wing judge…
Well…I really didn’t plan on writing a second day about the courts but the actions of the judges appointed by repubs have gotten to the point where someone has to say something….after Obama a went on record saying he believed that the ACA should and would be upheld and if the supreme court struck it down it would need a very good reason…and not the “broccoli” defense that Scalia put forth in oral arguments…a republican appointed appeals court judge, Jerry Smith, had the gall to demand that the justice department and by extension, Obama, explain his comments in a written response to the judge…nevermind that the president gets to express his opinion about the political ramifications of court cases….this judge doesn’t have the power to request anything from the executive branch. I just marvel at the audacity of the repubs these days who spent the last 3 years decrying the “overreach” of the courts, and then cheer when one of their own vastly oversteps his power to score political points with the fox news talking points of the day. This just shows the rot that has permeated the “modern” repub party where the traditions of the separate branches of government and the checks and balances that are outlined in the constitution are just to be ignored when they sense a political advantage can be gained….and this rot has reached all the way to the supreme court and the right wing judges who are poised to impose their warped view of justice on the American people….geez…
Activist judges and the right…
Well…I find it funny how things flip and flop in the political arena, especially when it comes to “activist judges” that the right seems to decry until the judges are the conservative bloc on the supreme court. I don’t even know why the right calls themselves conservatives anymore…that used to mean a reverence for the institutions and traditions of the country including hundreds of years of legal precedence know as “stare decisis” that they now want ignored by the court to further their radical right wing agenda. That is not conservatism, it is radicalism cloaked in the robes of Scalia, Roberts, and the others that blatantly lied about their reverence for the traditional role of judges…to find the facts in relation to the law leaving politics outside of the courtroom….but these “justices” see their roles as co-equal legislatively to the congress and are ready to ignore the constitution to further the goals of the tea party whose rise has done more to coarsen the political discourse and ruin the art of compromise on which democracies function. I hope the Roberts court does throw out the ACA….then we can get to where we need to be in healthcare…poised to go to a single payer system whose purpose will be to provide affordable care for all Americans…not profit for a few…geez…
More shenanigans by Michigan Republicans…
Well…it must be nice for the relatives of the Michigan republicans these days when they can lose money, get sued, and then get a law passed that wipes out 2.4 million dollars in debt. If you haven’t heard, that is just what happened last week when Snyder signed into law a bill that relieved the brother of the house repub chair here, Bobby Schostak, of the 2.4 million dollar loss that the appeals court said he owed on a failed property in Traverse City. The gist of the story is that the Schostaks are wealthy developers here, and the younger Schostak signed a contract that said he would be personally responsible for losses on this property…when the economy tanked, he walked away from the property that was worth 2.4 million less than he owed on it, the bank sued, and all of the courts here said he owed the money. So, what does a connected republican do here in Michigan? As always, they change the rules and use crony capitalism to pass this law that retroactively immunizes the leader’s brother from the loss…wouldn’t you like to be able to do that with the house you are upside down on? It is a breach of the public trust for the repubs to cheat the system for personal gain…but, what else should you expect from these guys? After all they are the ones who raised taxes on workers so they could hand a 2 billion dollar tax cuts to the corporations that bought them the election….and it just goes on and on…geez….
One last thing…the bill was written by the Schostak brothers attorney…..
It’s about the social contract…not healthcare…
Well…just another short one on the arguments that happened on the ACA in the Supreme Court and the fact that I think that people are missing the point of the whole thing….I can understand why some on the right don’t want to be “forced” to buy healthcare under the new law…but, how many of them are already forced to by the fear that a health problem will bankrupt them? What’s the difference between the two? How many of them have ever canceled their insurance in the name of freedom? You can probably count them on one hand. But, this whole argument has never been about healthcare to me….it is whether or not we we still have a social contract where we work for the common good of the society and where, sometimes, in that society we have to make compromises that will benefit the whole while placing a small burden on each of us as individuals. That is what the individual mandate is…a small burden for the majority of us that will help the 50 million people who can’t afford the peace of mind that comes with being insured….but, those on the right, including the debate audience that when asked about an uninsured person needing care to save his life and chorus sung out “let him die” are actively tearing down the social contract that has served this nation so well over the past 200 plus years….what kind of a country will we have left when those on the right get what they want…back to the days of “I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell” that prevailed in the early 20th century….I’m glad I’m getting older and won’t be around to see it if the right wins…geez…