Well…I’ve got a bunch of things running around in my head today and they are stating to itch so I thought I’d get a few down here in what I call a mish mash of ideas and thoughts. First, I am really surprised at the industry of revising history that has arisen around ole GW….the latest idea that is being floated is that Mubarek leaving in Egypt can be attributed to GW’s policy of freedom and democracy for the Arab world. I am stunned by the gall of these folks, what’s next, are they going to take credit for the snow melting here in Michigan? For the record, the Egyptian uprising was not, and I’ll repeat, was not a result of anything that GW or his cronies did…I think it was set back by their inept and simplistic foreign policy and can only be the result of the Egyptian people saying enough and having the social media tools that allowed them to move faster than the Egyptian government could. No cigar for GW….
Next…you should be appalled at the focus of the cuts in government that are coming from the repub house…as always, these are going after the poorest and least powerful with these cuts…where is there proposed cut to the subsidies for the oil industry that total almost 20 billion dollars a year? What about the subsidies for the factory farms out there and the one for ethanol? They cry and cry about letting the market control this stuff but when it comes to doing whats right, money talks and you and I get screwed. People need to wise up to these lies…and I don’t mind cutting wasteful spending, but let’s not cut early childhood education and subsidies for college students while the rich keep getting theirs….they are setting us up for long term failure as a nation where only the rich will be able to afford the education we need to compete….okay, that was only two topics…don’t think that qualifies as a mish mash…I will have a couple more later….have to have lunch first…
Well…I do hate to pick on one person all of the time..no that’s not true, I love to call out the idiocies and inconsistencies on both the right and left…but if you’ve been here before, you’ve noticed I do tend to to go after those on the right more…but I should because they are the ones that have taken idiocy to a new level that I could not have imagined a few years ago. This morning I was reading the Detroit News again (I know, why should I keep reading that right wing rag?) and our boy Nolan Finley is at it again…taking the president to task for going to the chamber and asking them to take part in the recovery by hiring. Well..old Nolan goes on either to lie, or to show his ignorance of economic reporting saying that companies are not going to hire until they are profitable when, as you and I and almost everyone else in the US knows, retained corporate profits are at their highest level in the history of the world. He goes on to assert that they are not hiring because of the repub talking point about uncertainty keeping business from being able to plan and know what their costs are going to be down the road. Nolan, Nolan, Nolan….the only uncertainty that business cares about it whether or not the billions they spent buying a republican house is going to give them free reign to steal more from the pockets of workers. You guys have created the uncertainty about the healthcare law….spending almost all of your time since the new congress started trying to repeal the law when you know it won’t happen and snowing your business buddies that the money they gave you is going to get them something; all the while collaborating with them to keep from hiring to make sure you have a new talking point.
But that’s not the worst of it….here in Michigan the earned income tax credit for lower income folks is being eliminated while business is given a huge tax cut…this is a tax increase no matter how the right tries to spin it…and these guys are held up as fiscally responsible when any time the previous governor asked for more taxes to help cut the deficit she was tarred as a tax and spend liberal. I guess it’s okay if you raise taxes on those that have no money, power or lobbyists…another example of the hypocrites that reside in the modern repub party….geez…
Well…in reading all of the press about the events in Egypt, one thought just came to me…these people are protesting the theftocracy that has been running their country for the last 50 years and the media is all gung-ho about covering it…but, the question that immediately popped into my head was “why not here?” When it has been determined that it is noble to fight against the entrenched power and the cronyism that has stolen so much from the Egyptians, I see a parallel to what is going on in the US right now and the media just ignores it; and our politicians call it capitalism. The rich, connected and business are doing exactly the same thing here that has gone on in Egypt for the past 50 years…maybe in a more subtle way….if it is so noble for the Egyptians to fight, why are we that fight for the same thing here in the US called socialists, communists, or worse…un-American? Is it different here that the wholly owned subsidiary of business, the Republican Party, works every day to take away from the middle class and give more to the rich and business when the ruling party in Egypt does the same thing? Show me the difference between Egypt and us.
We need our own Tahrir Square where business and the thieves that run them are called out, where the workers that built this country are given the voice that has been silenced by money and power…until that time we are just a more developed Egypt…waiting for the smoldering embers to become a flame…geez….
Well…finally found a trend that has re-started the fires of outrage somewhat and it should do the same for anyone who believes there should still be a middle class here in America. This latest attack on the workers here in the US is led by the repub governors that were elected in the last election and who have made it an unstated, but nonetheless all too real purpose of their administrations to break the public sector unions. As a financial realist as opposed to an agenda driven repub, I too understand that there are costs in many of the states that are unsustainable…but this is not an act of god as the repubs would have you believe but is a direct result of the misguided (or I should say planned) repub bowing at the altar of tax cuts to ensure that they ‘starve the beast” since they don’t believe there is a need for government at all. The spurious numbers they use to support their contentions that slashing the pay here in Michigan is that public sector wages have gone up in the last 10 years while in the private sector, wages have been stagnant or falling. I think their logic is flawed but consistent with their overall goals; to destroy all unions and the one bright spot for the middle class in an environment where the richest have seen their compensation double in the same time period. So, why no cry that these folks are overpaid and should give back to the states where they reside? To ask middle class folks to give back when the rich are given tax breaks at the expense of you and I is morally reprehensible but goes to the agenda of the repubs….they will never be happy until the rich have it all and the rest of us are left to feed off the scraps that fall from their tables….
All of us should just say stop…let’s expose this agenda and start working together to ensure that you, I, and our children only share in the sacrifice to get this country moving again…not make all of it…geez…
Well….if you’ve read the papers or turned on the tv lately, you’ve no doubt seen the increasing deification of Ronald Reagan that has surrounded the 100th anniversary of his birth. You would think this guy was the second coming the way his legacy is being scrubbed and polished by the right as they bow to the altar of tax cuts. There is only one thing that this mediocre at best president should be remembered for and that was his fervent belief in tax cuts for the rich and the whole trickle-down economic voodoo that has been foist upon the country by the repubs ever since. The one thing these idiots don’t want anyone to remember is that those tax cuts that exploded the deficit in the 80′s never resulted in any additional growth in jobs or standard of living for the vast majority of Americans; exactly the same thing we saw with the Bush tax cuts…no job growth and an exploding deficit that the repubs now say is a bad thing when, up to the last year or so, they chanted the mantra that “deficits don’t matter” only to change their tune when the dems took the White House. I hope you remember that this whole tax cut nonsense was based on theories by the disgraced economist Arthur Laffer….and his “Laffer Curve” that proposed that cutting taxes would increase revenue….never happened and yet the repubs are still clinging to those old, thoroughly discredited ideas and trying the same thing again expecting different results.
So, let’s stop this nonsense that he was one of the best presidents in history…best for his party, maybe, but for the vast majority of Americans he was and still is a failure. One note of disclosure here…I voted for this guy…now I cringe at that thought.
Well…just had a thought and I may have shared it before but I’m going to get this down again since I think it’s an important one. Did you notice that while the repubs are always screaming about “activist” judges and courts, it is the first place they turn when they don’t get their way? And, they always make sure that their lawsuits will get heard by judges that can be relied upon to tread the repub line when they are supposed to follow the law and precedent. This crap started with Bush V. Gore and continues to this day with the healthcare law that most of the people in this country don’t want repealed. But, the repubs want to undue the will of the people for their corporate masters, as always….I think they should be sued for malfeasance in office and have them have to pay damages to you and me…
Well….I had hope that with a new governor who ran on the premise that he was going to be the “CEO” of Michigan and was going to tell the truth, we were going to get something different than the standard issue repub. That hope is now gone with the issuance of his financial road map for Michigan’s future and the blatant skewing of statistics that is being used to attack the unionized public sector workers here. I don’t think these guys are going to be happy until everyone here in Michigan is working for minimum wage and then they’ll take that away. So, let’s get to the lie…and it is a whopper….to prove that the public sector workers are the biggest part of the budget problem here, they compared these full time workers with some benefits to the population as a whole that includes part time and under employed workers and then shouted from the rooftops that “see, these people are overpaid by almost 20%” compared to the general population. No effort to normalize by age, education, or even to using similar private sector jobs.
But, as you know, these are the same, tired old tactics that the repubs always use…and now Snyder is trying to walk back from the comments, just like they always do….say something really outrageous and then the merely unreasonable appears to be a compromise while they stand up and say how terrible the other side is because the repubs have offered to move on the issue. Liars all….
Well….I just don’t get it…don’t these morons on the right think we have memory? Let’s get right to it again…over the past few years, the repubs have repeated, and repeated, and repeated that they think the federal government is too large and intrusive…led by ole Manny Lopez here who has said many times that he thinks it would be better if the state was just left to go it’s own way and to hell with the federal government…and any time that Governor Granholm went to Washington to try to get help for the state, it was a an extension of the welfare state mentality. But, today, in the Detroit News, Manny goes on that it is a wonderful thing that our current governor went to Washington to ask for money for the state going so far as to say that the previous Democratic governor never did that; a statement that is breathtakingly disingenuous. He then goes on to applaud the current governor for going 5 times to business leaders to get their advice, stating that is something that governor Granholm never did. Gee, I wonder why Manny? Could it be because governor Snyder is one of them….and puts their welfare above that of the workers of the state and just rolls over to whatever they want since they bought the election for him? C’mon Manny…at least try to be a journalist….oh, that’s right, you’re not….my mistake…geez…
Well…I am laughing out loud at a fact that I just uncovered in the news this morning, something I probably should have learned a couple of weeks or months ago with all of the news I read….I know you’ve read about the concerted effort by the repubs to discredit the Congressional Budget Office…the non-partisan part of the government that calculates (or estimates) the cost of proposed legislation, saying that the 253 billion dollar savings from the healthcare law is just their “opinion” and is based on untrue assumptions. They are going so far as is the tired old phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out” to describe the process used to come to those conclusions. Well…guess what? Guess where the repubs got the figures that put job-killing in the title of the healthcare repeal bill that was just passed in the House? Yep, you guessed it…from the very same analysis that reported a net savings from the healthcare reform bill….go on, you can laugh, too….
Well…here’s the shorty I promised…did anyone else laugh when one of the repub congressmen had the gall or chutzpah to get up on the floor of the house and claim that the recovery that is slowly building is because the repubs took control of the House? Nevermind that they haven’t done anything but bluster and waste time on the doomed repeal of the healthcare law since they took control. These guys are the most cynical type of politicians…those who oppose real reform and stimulus for the economy to play to their base and then, when it looks like they were wrong, come crawling out from under their rocks to claim that their actions in opposing this help was what has made the economy turn around. I just hope they keep this up, I hope they keep trying to repeal healthcare..especially when only 18% of the country wants this done…they will be exposed as the shills they are for the insurance lobby and maybe, just maybe, the American people will start to vote in their own self interests, not in the interests of the wealthy an powerful….geez…