Well…here we are in the last week before the election, and I thought it’s time to try to put the differences that you will see if the repubs win in the starkest possible terms. But I think that I am going to try to take it a little easy for the week; to take each part of the possible changes and get at them in detail in separate posts….that may change as the week goes on and if it looks like it’s not sustainable….this first one will deal with the lack of reasonableness (I know, I’ve talked about this before) that has paralyzed the country…to the point that even if politicians from each side of the aisle do cooperate, they can never say a good word about each other or their base will make them pay….let alone do the things that this country needs to go forward. One of the things that I just can’t understand is why none of these politicians (mostly on the right) has the guts to do what is best for the country; not only their party. Do you people who are going to vote for the repubs think they will be able to get anything done? And why would you want them to get anything done when all they do is favor business and their rich cronies? Don’t give me the baloney that the Obama administration is “taking away our freedom” when the healthcare bill requires people to buy insurance in 2014. I’ll bet most of the bitchers have health insurance provided for them on the job…and they just don’t understand how lucky they are to have it. But they also don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves…certainly not for the common good….more later…
Category Archives: Politics
Nobody’s fault but ours….
Well…that title is a paraphrase of a Led zeppelin song title, and it came to me today on the bike that if we let the crazies and the know nothings take this election, it nobody’s fault but ours. It our fault if we sit this one out because it has become too partisan, or because we’re not energized enough, or because we’re too busy…this is way too important to not take a half hour out of our busy days and get out to vote…and there is a difference between the candidates that can’t be overstated…go back to Bush and deregulation or keep going forward where government puts it’s thumb on the scale FOR us, not against us.
This could be our chance to make sure businesses won’t keep spending secret money to get their way; to buy legislators and legislation that allows them to get rewarded for taking, taking, and taking…if we don’t believe the lies those right-wing ads are full of…if we hear ‘failed stimulus package” and think: LIE…if we hear 500 billion in Medicare cuts and think: LIE…and if we hear “Nancy Pelosi’s best friend” and think: LIE….we can get them to stop with our votes because they will stop spending the money if it doesn’t get results. So, let’s not give them the results they are looking for. It’s nobody’s fault but ours if we let this country go down the drain…again, it up to you and me…
The Dems got played…
Well… this is going to be a short one but it is a thought I’ve had for a while and wanted to pass along…if you remember in the last election cycle, some of the insurance industry’s biggies supported dems since they could see that they were going to win control of the congress and if they were going to keep their promise to tackle healthcare, they wanted a seat at the table. They did buy that seat at the table and what that got them was the bastardized healthcare bill that had one great requirement that they lobbied hard for…that everyone will have to buy insurance from them. Once they got that little gem…they are now funding Repubs exclusively since they now want them to repeal the parts of the law that they had to swallow to get their individual mandate. Now, if the repubs take control you can bet that the insurance folks will lobby to keep the mandate but will get their way again when it comes to covering pre-existing conditions and the cost controls that are part of the bill. I have to hand it to them for playing the long con here…but we can take their victory away by keeping control of one of the houses of Congress in the dems hands and then moving to the government option that will take the insurance industry and their thousands of lobbyists out of the equation. It’s not that hard folks…just get out and vote…geez…
Let’s connect some dots…
Well…you know I’ve talked about the Citizens United case here before but with the new information that is trickling out of the blackout wall erected by the right, I feel there is enough to start to connect the dots on how our democracy has been hijacked by the unholy trinity of business, repubs, and the supreme court. Late in the day yesterday, the guest list from one of the Koch brothers soirees whose purpose was to plot strategy to regain control of congress was discovered. Guess who was on the list? Well.. Fox News, of course, and the RNC, and reps from the Citizens United group, but there were two people that were supposed to be kept secret: Justices Thomas and Scalia of the Supreme Court. Yep, that’s right, Supreme court justices at a political strategy meeting for the right-wing takeover of the Congress. Doesn’t anyone else see the conflict of interest here? Do you think it’s just coincidence that just a few months later, the Court overturned over a hundred years of settled law on the rights of corporations and the will of the people that the money of corporations could not be used influence elections?
Now, I’m not saying that the justices were bribed to make this decision, but, I do think their political leanings are affecting their judicial duty and they have become the most activist court in the history of the US. But it’s not activist for you and me, when cases come to them that deal with individual rights, they are all too willing to shred the fourth amendment and others; always deferring to their ideology instead of the law. We have become a worse nation for it…geez…
Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican…
Okay…has there ever been a more hypocritical bunch of folks than the current crop of Republicans? If you’ve been watching television at all over the last couple of months, you’ve no doubt seen the political ads that state with ominous certainty that the stimulus package has failed. It is a staple of the ads here in Michigan; second only to the repugs use of Nancy Pelosi as the scariest thing since Dracula, but, there is a little glitch in those attacks…it seems while McConnel, Bachmann, and Sessions hammer on their fake facts that the stimulus didn’t work, they have written letters to the agencies that are administering these funds touting the effectiveness of the spending in creating and preserving jobs in their districts. Now, what is it? Did the stimulus not work or did it add jobs? I am so tired of the American people believing this blatant hypocrisy…and I am just as tired of the “mainstream media” not running these inconvenient facts on the front pages of newspapers across the country. When did lies and hypocrisy become acceptable? Now I know you’re going to say that everyone lies and the Dems are just as culpable…but that in itself is not true…the repugs have raised it to an art form because they know that people just don’t care, that the American public lives in a world of sound bites and superficiality that will allow them to take back control of the country….and finish killing it. Geez…
Molly Ivins was right…
Well…started reading the book ‘Bushwhacked” by Molly Ivins, the late columnist for the New York Times and all I can say is my depression has returned with the realization that she was right…not just about the “Shrub”, but about how business has bought this country…from the Supreme Court down through the state legislatures. The book is nominally about ole GW, but I see it as more an example of how pernicious the effect of money is in our election process, but not only that, it is a succinct indictment of the power that business wields in out society. And now I see that some of you that voted for Obama and change away from the wholesale theft of America, are leaning toward voting for the crooks that are rigging the game against you…that are using the secret money that is flowing into the repubs hands to steal this election. I now see this fight as one where we won a round in 2008, where we started to take the country back from the rampant business interests, but it was only one round…we need to be in this fight for the entire bout, until we can take the thumb of business off the scale and run this country for “we the people” again. But, we can’t do it if you fall for the lies of the right and big business…it is not better to have 50 million Americans without health insurance, it is not better to continue to give tax breaks to companies that move our jobs overseas, it is not better to have our elections stolen by secret money that is buying the legislators they are supporting. It’s up to us….
I think this is going to be a serial as I get deeper into the book and try to connect things that have happened like Enron, Adephia, Harken Oil, and others, to what you can expect if you vote for these guys again.
What’s wrong with being an elite?
Well…I’ve been listening to some of the repub candidates and the new, or not so new, talking point has to do with the class warfare they want to foment between themselves, the just regular folks, and the “East coast or political elites” that they say have screwed up this country. Let’s take the statement by Carly Fiorina, the fired ex-head of Hewlett Packard who ran the company into the ground and then parachuted out with a 50 million dollar severance which has powered her race in California. A race that she has spent almost 40 million dollars of her own money on to get elected, and that has for one of the main themes the attacks on the “elites” that run this country. Now, I think that someone who can spend 40 million dollars of their own money on a political campaign pretty elite, don’t you? And yet, the people that follow her are eating this stuff up. Are they too stupid or are they too blinded by rage to do the thinking that would make this assertion by Carly laughable at best?
Then, we have the anti intellectual Christine O’Donnell making fun of the fact and bursting her chest with pride that she didn’t go to Yale like her opponent; that she doesn’t have an advanced degree but is “just like you” and asserts that her lack of accomplishment either educationally or in life in general makes her the most qualified person for the senate seat from Delaware. When did the great accomplishment of graduating from college and going on to graduate school become a bad thing? It used to be that it was a great pride of America that these things could happen; and that the people that did the work and made the sacrifice to earn those advanced degrees were somehow special, and were to be emulated. But, the repubs have made it an asset to be the least educated, least capable, and least self-aware of any of the candidates…and their followers howl with derision at anyone who can think and make them think. I think what this is going to guarantee as the years pass is that we get people elected that truly don’t believe that we need to support education, that it is not really important for the “Real Americans” and will accelerate our slide to second class nation status.
But, this doesn’t need to happen, we can ensure that we continue to go forward as a nation by finding the smart people to elect, that have shown that they have the toughness to get into the trenches to fight for a better America…who won’t quit when the going gets tough (yep, that’s for you Sister Sarah) and who realizes that compromise is what makes a democracy work; not slash and burn…geez…
Like a monkey with a loaded pistol…
Well…finally getting to the topic of the influx of “silent” money that has come as a result of the Citizens United decision by the Supreme court. Doesn’t anyone see a problem or conflict of interest when a Republican organization brings a suit to the right-wing supreme Court and then gets a ruling that allows republican leaning business to donate as much money to the repubs as they want without any disclosure whatsoever? If you don’t think this as a concerted plan to aid their business buddies, you just have to look at the efforts of the Repubs in congress to filibuster the bill that would have made the small requirement that these funds report where the money was coming from. When I was growing up, these “donations” were called slush funds and more than one politician was booted out of office for running one…and doesn’t it seem to you that this money comes with a quid pro quo that will buy these donating corporations favorable legislation that will again squash the hopes and dreams of the regular folks? It’s something the I have championed for the time I’ve been writing this thing… that government is supposed to be the referee between big business and the people…government is supposed to be the protector of the middle class against this unlimited money and influence…can any of you give 10 million dollars to get your pet legislation through the congress that will give you tax free income in perpetuity? Didn’t think so…but the repubs are intent on rigging the game since they can’t win fair and square; with ideas that will make this country greater, that will grow the middle class, that will allow the normal folks like you and me to at least have a chance…but you know the repubs don’t want you to have a chance…the only thing they know is to steal more and more of this country for their rich buddies. Is this your vision of America? Nope, not mine either.
Now…to get to the title…our old buddy, Karl Rove is at the center of all of this slush money…his “fund” has almost 50 million dollars in it (from his business buddies from the Bushie years) that he is going to use to defeat Democrats in the November elections. Does anyone other than me think this is a bad idea? This is the criminal who was behind the outing of Valarie Plame, the firings of federal attorneys who wouldn’t pursue his political vendettas, and the big one, the selling of the Iraq war on the blatantly false assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. When I heard about his founding his slush fund, the first thing that came to mind was it was like giving a monkey a loaded pistol….there’s no predicting the damage that will be done, and I’d rather give the 50 mil to a monkey than Karl….geez…
The truth comes out…
Well…if you’ve paid any attention to ongoing story of the tea party and their efforts to position themselves as anti tax and anti big government, you’ve seen some cracks lately that expose what they truly are…just retreaded social conservative repubs. Their handlers at Freedom Works (the billionaires club that is backing them) must be going nuts when they stray from the coached lines they have been told to say; the poll driven, faux populist themes of big socialist government and tax cuts for the rich. But, it looks like they are herding cats with the meltdown of their darling, Carl Paladino, who is running for governor of New York. At a meeting with conservative religious groups over the last week, the curtain was pulled back on the drivers of the movement, the same old race and gay bashing that has been a cancer on this country for too many years. In those meetings, Mr. Paladino fell back into the tired old attacks on the “Gay agenda” and the standard right wing assertion that there is indoctrination of our children to accept the gay “lifestyle.” Where is this guy from, the 50′s?
But this crap was only the latest in the truth of the tea party being exposed in the statements of their “superstar” candidates…where Sharron Angle brings back one of the greatest hits of the repub playbook in her advocacy of privatization of Social Security and Christine O’Donnell wants to create a Christian theocracy and doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state. Haven’t we heard this all before? I do give credit to Dick Armey and his partners the Koch brothers in maintaining this scam for so long, but underneath it all is just the same old crap in a new package called the Tea Party. Geez…
Okay…I know this isn’t the one about corporate money buying the election but when inspiration hits, who knows where it will take you…and this time it took me someplace else…
There really was no stimulus…
Well….don’t you just love the repubs mastery of the non-fact in the political ads they are running here in Michigan? Every one of them repeats their mantra of the “failed stimulus program” and the “Socialist expansion of government” of the Obama administration but they don’t acknowledge the true facts; what Paul Krugman said in the NYT this morning. There was neither a stimulus program or any expansion of government…in fact, there are 350,000 less federal workers now than when Obama took office. If there was a huge increase in government stimulus spending, where are the new roads, bridges, airports, or tunnels? There are none…okay, there have been repairs of some existing roads, etc., but to say there has been a huge increase in the reach of government and it’s spending is just another lie..but the problem is, you people believe the crap the repubs have been spewing…and it is a page out of the playbook they have been running since Clinton…repeat a lie enough times, and in the minds of the public, it becomes the truth…talk about your 1984 comparison.
Most of the money had to be spent on safety net programs that the repubs just hate and never lead to increased spending on the part of the consumer that is out of work…so why haven’t the Dems hammered the repubs on these inconvenient facts…well…they don’t have their own tv network for one, but I think there still is a spark of the old style of politics in the Democratic party…where you expect people to want the facts; but in today’s political environment, facts are just something to be ignored if they don’t fit your narrative…and the lies continue…geez…