Well…I have a few thoughts that I want to get down on here so I will be adding to this one as the day goes on…first, I wanted to comment on the furor that is coming from the right on the recess appointments made this past week by the president and the subsequent ruling from the DOJ that the appointments are legal. The attacks center on the idea that since the senate repubs are trotting a senator out every few days to stand around in the senate chamber, the senate is in session and the president can’t appoint anyone until they can consent. This is utter nonsense since every president in history has made recess appointments and the DOJ has said that this is legal….but, that just drove the second set of attacks that ridicule the DOJ ruling on the appointments legality since the AG was appointed by Obama….but, they conveniently ignore the fact that the AG appointed by ole GW did exactly the same thing when it approved indefinite detentions for terror suspects…so, I call hypocrisy, again, on these idiots…maybe this one is long enought without adding to it…and if I do another, I will be caught up for the month…
Category Archives: Politics
Too much confusion…
Well…it has been a tumultuous week in politics and the happenings are making my head swim a little, sowing the seeds of confusion while I try to make sense of it. One of the things I find quite interesting is the attack line that is being used on ole Mitt…you would think that the other repubs in the primaries are really democrats with the populist attacks on Mitt’s tenure at Bain Capital…didn’t they get the memo that capitalism=good and, to quote Mitt, “the only people that are really successful are those that are in the 1%…”? It doesn’t matter to him that the majority of the 1% started out with lots of money (like him or Huntsman), or used their government connections (like Santorum or Gingrich) to get rich and these guys truly believe that it’s okay to rail against government on one hand and then profit from government on the other hand. I truly hope this continues since it is making me grin…but I will say it doesn’t take much to amuse me…
Bain Capital’s brand of capitalism…
Well…interesting research in the papers today that revealed some facts about ole Mitt’s tenure at Bain…and his new stump speech claiming that, while at Bain, the company never took any “bailouts” or government assistance of any sort. Mitt, Mitt, Mitt…I really don’t understand how you guys don’t understand that there are records out there, that things can be fact checked…and this one is just a huge lie…in two instances, Bain was bailed out of debt by the government…once with the FDIC forgiving 10 million dollars that was owed…and the other when they killed a steel company and then dumped the pension liabilities on the government to the tune of 45 million dollars while the execs at Bain walked away with 10 million in bonuses…yep, that’s ole Mitt’s form of capitalism…swoop in, gut a company, and then profit from pushing the liabilities of those companies on the taxpayers. I don’t see this as any different from any other bailout that happened over the past few years…just another case of the rich taking advantage of the system to steal from you and me…geez…
The true republicans come out…
Well..I hope you’ve been watching the lead up to the NH primary on the repub side and all of the Mitt bashing that has been done by the others in the race…I find it one of the funniest things I’ve seen in years but my neck hurts from watching all of the flip-flopping that has been going on. One of the most hilarious attacks centers on ole Mitt’s job creation record at Bain capital, with the crowd of contenders abandoning the central tenet of modern repub thought that business equals good and the hell with everyone else…and citing the fact that jobs were killed when Bain took over many companies while ole Mitt was running it as a reason to not elect him. What are these guys going to do if they do defeat Mitt? I just love how much ammunition the left is getting from all of these sound bites…and the fact that all of this sound a fury is exposing the repubs for what they are….unprincipled idiots who will do or say anything that they think will get them elected.
One last thing…one of the things that ole Mitt cites that makes him a job creator was Bain’s investment in Staples and he even goes so far to make it sound like he created Staples from his own ideas…it’s just not true..Bain supplied money and that was it…
A little about K street Rick…
Well…just wanted to do a short one before I make lunch and get on to the rest of the day…I’m going to be really blunt here about Rick Santorum….and no, I’m not going to go into what comes up when you Google Santorum…what I want to deal with is how a broke, ex-senator goes from a crushing defeat in an election (by almost 20 points), to making almost 2 million dollars last year. When you look at the breakdown, you can see the most egregious crony capitalism at work with his income being derived from serving on corporate boards; positions that were given to him by his previous corporate masters, along with hundreds of thousands of dollars made by being the scourge of our democracy; a K street lobbyist whose only goal is to line his own pockets and those of the corporations that employed him. Do we really think that this idiot can really represent anyone but the 1%? I think the last thing we need is to have another racist, right wing nutjob as president…we are still recovering from the last one….geez…
More GOP nonsense…here in Michigan…
Well…I was going to comment on the doubling down of the repubs on their nonsensical tax plans, or their hatred of gays, or anyone else that is not like them….but, for some reason, the bike ride emptied my brain of all of the thoughts that I had in there…and lately, the thoughts have been thin to say the least. Okay, going back to the papers to look for the topics that were there….there is one that I wanted to tackle is the whole transfer the tax burden from the rich and corporations to individual workers and retirees. First, there was the lie of the direness of the financial state of Michigan…we were told that without the corporate tax cuts and increases on individuals along with benefit cuts, that Michigan would have an unsustainable deficit that would stretch into the forseeable future…but, let’s take a look at what really happened…magically there is a billion dollar surplus in the state’s coffers at the end of the year…before any of Snyder’s tax changes took place and it looks like Snyder and his cronies were lying again to reward their corporate masters with 1.7 billion dollars in tax cuts. How much longer do we sit here and allow the looting of our state by these thieves? Geez…
I predicted this one….
Well…a few days ago, I expressed my hope that one of the outcomes of the Iowa repub nonsense would be that both Perry and Bachmann would just go home and we would never have to hear from them again…and I predicted that poor showings would have that result. I am happy to report here that ole Rick is heading back to Texas to “think” about his campaign…I don’t know what he is going to think about…can he even think? Or, will his donors and cronies do the thinking for him while he styles his hair? Then, ole Micheel has a news conference scheduled for this afternoon for a “major announcement” on the direction of her campaign…but the only direction I see for her is to head due north back where she came from….maybe we can hope that she will retire and go back to “un-gaying” gays in Minnesota. What a couple of know-nothing losers that even the delusional repubs have rejected as being unqualified…now, if we could just do the same for ole Newt and Santorum, the IQ of the entire party would rise about 50 points.
One last thing, I’m going to keep hammering on Mitt for the lies on job creation that he keeps spouting on the trail…the latest is that he “created” over 100K jobs while at Bain Capital…but he never nets that with the hundreds of thousands of jobs that he killed while stealing the assets of the companies that Bain purchased..so folks…you can tell when ole Mitt is lying about his jobs record…it’s when he opens his mouth…geez…
A few things..
Well…just a few things that I want to comment on this morning to try to get back in the swing of things and get some political commentary going again…first…I just can’t wait for the Iowa nonsense to be over and done with…and I am glad I don’t live there to have to listen to and see all of the political ads that have dominated the airwaves…but there will be one bright spot to come out of today..or maybe two…we probably won’t have to listen to Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry any more since they are both likely to finish well back in the pack…I don’t know why anyone listened to them anyway…they are two of the most stupid sounding politicians that I have ever heard…and I’ve been around a long time. I really can’t wait until they start to hammer ole Mitt on his claims to have created over 100K jobs while at Bain Capital when it is just not true…never created one job….remember that folks…never created one job and I look forward to him having to really answer for his destructive reign there and personally profiting in the hundreds of millions of dollars while he and his cronies looted companies that would still be alive if it weren’t for them.
Oh, one last thing….I see that the incestuous right wing media nonsense continues in today’s Detroit News where they treat their house dog Manny Lopez as an independent writer when they published his screed about Obama’s vacation and ole Manny’s contention that Obama can’t care about the 99 percenters since he is one of the one percent. The first thing to me is that there should be disclosure that Manny is regular columnist at the News and to make it look like he is an independent “other voice” is just dishonest and only adds to the echo chamber that is the right wing media. The more salient point to make here, though, is that Obama worked hard and achieved his way to the one percenter that he is…he didn’t have mommy or daddy start him on third base and tell him he hit a triple…geez….
Maybe the Republicans are getting some sense….
Well…there is not much going on with politics but the Iowa nonsense with the repubs but I can’t believe that there is so much time and attention being expended on this weird, throwback of a process. When you do the math, the whole caucus there and all of the votes amount to less than one-half of one percent of the total electorate in the US and the winner comes out thinking that he or she is presidential material and has earned a mandate to continue. But that is not what this is about…this is supposed to be about the repubs getting some sense and abandoning the idiot Newt for the nonsense he has been spouting…now, ole Newt may be right at home in a Dickens novel, but he is certainly not presidential material and it looks like even the hard right that controls the elections in Iowa has wised up to that fact. Well…maybe I’m wrong that they’ve gotten smarter…since they have pushed Rick Santorum to second place in the polls and have even kept Ron Paul in the running…this could be fun to watch if you like slow-motion crashes….I know, not too lucid but I’m really trying so bear with me a while…if I don’t get better then abandon me…
Everyone’s doing fine but the workers…
Well…this one just popped into my head about an article that I saw a few days ago that said that the current congress is the richest one in the history of the country with the current crop’s net worth being 10 times the average Americans, and this points to one of the problems that I see with the country right now: that everyone but the workers are doing well. Corporations have the highest highest retained earnings of any time in history and CEO pay is at it’s highest in relation to worker’s pay since statistics have been kept…why doesn’t anyone connect the dots here? We have the rich in congress making laws for the rich bought and paid for by corporations that have done nothing but stagnate the income of the middle class (or, in real dollars have shrunk the income of the middle) and we wonder why no one is spending, we wonder why the economy can’t stop sputtering and start to move again? Until the middle gets a true share of their contribution to the economy and the rich stop taking more and more, we are doomed to just idle, to look at tiny slivers of hope and blow them out of proportion just because we want to believe that the American dream still exists…I’ve got news for you….it’s already gone…geez….