Category Archives: Politics

Politics

Let’s connect some dots…

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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…

Politics

Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican…

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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…

Politics

Molly Ivins was right…

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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.

Politics

What’s wrong with being an elite?

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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…

Politics

Like a monkey with a loaded pistol…

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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…

Politics

The truth comes out…

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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…

Politics

There really was no stimulus…

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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…

Politics

The Republican’s vision on display….

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Well…if your heart and the rest of America’s didn’t break a little when you heard of firefighters letting a couples house burn down because they didn’t pay a “firefighting fee”, then there is something seriously wrong with us and our society. But this is just the latest evidence of how the repubs vision for America will work for the little guy; how their “starve the beast”, tax cuts at all cost strategy impacts the real lives of citizens, from the homeowner in rural areas who has to pay extra for fire protection if they can get it at all, to the people of Detroit and other cities who see large areas abandoned by the police department because there is no way to raise the funds to hire officers to patrol. But, the rich still have the money to hire private police and, in some gated communities, their own fire departments who will, no doubt, sit and watch while houses outside their walls burn down because they have been successful in making sure there are no taxes available for these services for the rest of us.

What happened to the America where we felt and acted like we were all in this together? I think it’s a direct result of the repubs strategy to demonize our government and members of our society that are not like them. It’s easy to let someone’s house burn down or let them be robbed or murdered if they “haven’t taken care of themselves” or they don’t vote republican. As I said to T yesterday, “I’m glad I won’t be around much longer to see this wonderful country continue to decline” and I do believe the catch phrase that was first proposed in the comic strip Pogo from my youth: “I’ve see the enemy and he is us”…..geez….

Politics

Let’s blow up some myths…

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Well…an interesting article in the times this morning by Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist, addressing the myth of structural unemployment in regards to the current recession. Before you righties start bitching that Krugman is liberal leaning so his ideas are not credible…let’s see your Nobel prize winner who disagrees with J. M. Keynes (hey, this could be the Keynes one that I promised you) and who has a credible history of being right…..ok, still waiting…..still waiting…yep, thought so…you don’t have one.

In an economy with structural employment driven by a lack of skills, you would have at least a few industries who would be running ads looking for workers; looking to expand but not being able to because of the shortage of skilled workers. But, that is not the case in this economy, there is no demand for labor since the demand for goods and services is not rising. No matter what their skill level. Can the right truly believe that an industrial worker trained in Kaizen, The Toyota Production System, or JIT, no longer has a use and that is why they are out of work. If that is the case, then the billions and billions of dollars spent on training and equipment for these programs by management was one of the greatest scams ever perpetrated on American industry. When did managing an American company change completely so that someone with a Masters degree in Management and 30 years in industry no longer is qualified to manage? The skill deficit of the American worker is a myth that needs to be exploded and not used by the right as an excuse to do nothing to get people back to work…but, that’s what they want…they don’t care about workers; only their rich buddies that can reward them with enough money to get re-elected so they can maintain their income redistribution scheme that will take 3.7 trillion dollars over 10 years from you and me and give it to the rich. That’s the first one…going to look at some news and come back for the others…

Okay…had lunch and wanted to get back to one other thing…the complete disdain that the right has for conventional economic thought that traces itself back to Reagan and his embrace of Arthur Laffer and his “Laffer curve theory” that cutting taxes will increase government revenue by stimulating growth in the economy. This kind of baloney has been discredited long ago by the CBO and other economic organizations and analysts that have shown that all the cuts did was to explode the deficit. Something that is conveniently forgotten, or deliberately forgotten so the right can pursue the radical agenda of giving away America to the rich. But the point I wanted to make was that while the repubs are railing against government intervention in the economy and discounting Keynesian theory, they propose an even larger government intervention by the continuation of the Bush tax cuts that would dwarf the 800 billion stimulus program of the Obama administration. Again, intellectual dishonesty disguised as cutting edge political thought…geez…