Category Archives: Politics

One last thing on the Romneys…

Well…with this whole flap about “working” women and the outpouring of support for women who are fortunate enough to be able to choose to stay home and raise their children and the sainthood that is being bestowed on Ann Romney by the right, let’s not get the annointing oil out just yet…..let’s remember that when she said it was so hard to raise 5 kids and it was so much work, her situation has absolutely no resemblance to what most normal folks go through raising their families. Most families don’t have cadres of nannies, maids, drivers, and assistants to do the grunt work that has to be done to run a normal family..I wonder when the last time was that either Ann or Mitt drove to the dry cleaners or coached their soccer games or stayed up all night with a sick child? This is just another instance where the rich can never understand what the rest of the world is like for real working people….and then they try to tell the rest of us how to run our lives when they can’t conceive what it is like to live in America without the connections and inheritances that have insulated them from the real world…why don’t you just go back to your gated communities and leave the rest of us alone…and stop trying to take what little is left of the safety net away…don’t you already have enough?

Rich people just don’t get it…

Well…I really don’t want to dump on all rich people in this one…I know a few of them and they seem like okay sorts and some of them do good works in our community and make it better than it would be without them….but, and this is a big but, to have people like Mitt and Ann Romney say that they understand what it is like to be just a normal working person in the US is just nonsense…and ole Mitt compounds this by using his wife as his “adviser” on working women’s issues….when she has never in her life worried about bouncing a check or getting laid off or losing her healthcare. I read an interesting article the other day about the “bubble” that surrounds these rich folks…and the assertion by ole Mitt that they know what is going on for the rest of us because he listens to people that come to his campaign functions…but the immediate question that comes to me is ‘who comes to those functions?”…and it is overwhelmingly people that think like him, so he gets the misguided idea that he is on the right track with his policy solutions….and it just reinforces the fact that the repubs never govern for everyone in the country…the only people that they give a damn about are those that give money to them and vote for them…the last I checked, there are other people that are citizens, too…what about us? I think we are in the same situation nationally that we have been here in Michigan when we have had billionaires try to tell us they know what it is like to work for a living when they ran for governor….it is just not true…these folks have not for one day in their lives had to worry every morning when they wake up is this the day that my health fails and I lose everything that I’ve worked for my entire life because I can’t afford health insurance? Their answer is to repeal ACA and tell those of us nearing 60 that can’t find work is to “work harder” and things will work out…it’s just not true.

Mitt Romney is still a liar…

Well….I guess it had to come to this..especially when the repubs have no new policies to help deal with a slow economy other than the tired “tax cuts for the rich” mantra they have been spouting for the past 10 plus years…so that leads ole Mitt to keep on lying to his base…starting with a speech to the NRA the other day where he claimed that Obama wants to “take away our guns” but couldn’t cite one instance where a new law was enacted under Obama that would even modify the current law of the land that is the second amendment…then he goes right in to the “explosion” in new “regulators” under Obama…citing the growth in federal government employment of almost 150K during the current administration…conveniently not mentioning that more than half of that growth was in the defense department as a consequence of the surge in Afghanistan…and another 40K of those jobs were in the veterans administration that directly go to the care of the soldiers that are coming back from 12 years of war. So, Mitt, you spout that you will do more to support the military and veterans and yet when Obama does it it is an “explosion” of regulators? You are just going to make this falls election too easy with your flip flopping and hard right turns….keep it up…the more you talk, the more people don’t want you around…geez…

The republican “war on women” continues in Wisconsin…

Well…are these repubs great liars or what? On the day that ole Mitt comes out and says that it is Obama and dem economic policies that are hurting women, we have our old buddy Scott Walker in Wisconsin signing the repeal of a law that made it easier for women there to hold employers accountable for wage discrimination. This was not a law that intruded on the “rights” of corporations to do whatever they want, but it was a law that tried to rectify an insidious result of discrimination against women that had been proven time and again…that women performing the same job with the same qualifications were usually paid from 20 to 30% less than the men doing the job…something that is just wrong no matter how the repubs try to explain it away in terms that further demean women…like “women leave the workforce to have babies so they have lesser skills than men” never mind that 40% plus of the women in the workforce never leave it to have children. Nonsense, all, but this is the type of policy that ole Mitt has said he supports when he says that he supports Walker and his agenda “completely”….just another example of what the US will look like if these idiots take control…geez…

One more thing about jobs…

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…

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….