Well….before I get to the political stuff…I do have to relay one bit of trail weirdness…well…maybe not weirdness but coolness let’s say….there must have been a huge hatch of those little blue butterflies yesterday….there were hundreds of them on the trail and when I went through the swarms they looked just like blue snowflakes blowing in the wind…just the coolest thing…
Okay, now on to the stupidity….there is so much crying on the repub side about deficits that they want try to pass a constitutional amendment to limit the governments ability to respond to slowdowns by codifying the percentage of government spending to an average of the last thirty years….basically saying that they can see the future and know what is going to happen 10, 20, 30 years down the road. They didn’t even see the crash coming in 2008….how can they now believe they are prescient? Just another bunch of stupidity by the party of the know-nothings who are proud of their ignorance and who willfully confuse ideology with good policy and who choose ideology over the needs of the citizens of this country…geez….
Well…just a couple of things today…I haven’t been able to come up with a really coherent set of thoughts, so I’m just going to kind of let it loose and see what happens….first…with the anniversary of the Civil War’s start, I find it so odd that there is still an ongoing effort by some folks on the right and in the south to obscure what the war was about; they have been floating the whole states rights malarkey as a replacement for the real reason…the south wanted to keep slavery plain and simple. I wonder at the reason for these efforts, after all, it’s been 150 years. What benefit is there to be gained by trying to change the reasons? Just another episode to me where people on the right can’t accept facts and are intent on using one of their favorite tactics to change the truth; that is repeating lies until people say “oh, I’ve heard that somewhere” and then saying it must be the truth.
On other thing that I want to talk about is the lack of fight coming out of the White House in the budget battle which truly are struggles for the soul of this nation….why can’t they just stand up and compare what the US looks like now, and how it will look if the Ryan proposals are enacted…starting with the windfall the changes in Medicare would be for insurance companies…c’mon Obama, if you can’t make insurance companies look bad by just citing their actions, you’re just not paying attention..stop being so afraid of looking partisan and get to this whole tax cut nonsense for the rich…call the repub idiots out to prove that these cuts create jobs…which they don’t. How can you fumble this when all of the facts are on the side of the moderates….what does cutting funding for Planned Parenthood do to create jobs? Geez….I came up with these two by myself without much thinking, get off your butt and start working for us….and remember, crazy ideas from the right need to be called crazy…stop being so nice to these idiots and slap them with their lies, it is not partisan to call out idiots…I think you are allowing America to be hijacked by the tea partiers because you don’t have the guts to stand up and put them in their place…I for one, don’t want to have my life dictated by the 15% fringe that is the tea party…
Well..one of the most striking things that I have taken away from the budget battles that have been going on for the last couple of years is the utter lack of vision that the dems have laid out to support their version of America….and I fault Obama for a large part of it…his tiptoeing around to not anger the repubs have gotten him what? Nothing but an emboldened opposition whose crazy ideas have gotten a huge voice without the counterpoint of rationality that the president could bring to the discussion, and his almost unfathomable reliance on bipartisanship, or the appearance of bipartisanship, is making him look so disengaged that those of us in the middle and on the left are sitting here shaking our heads. I hope that the budget plan that is coming out from the dem leadership later in the week will help to flesh out what they think America should look like and I think they have a golden opportunity to contrast with the Ryan proposal; one that gives more and more to the rich while taking the majority of the savings from programs that are designed to help the middle class and poor.
It was a good start when Obama said that the plan will include increased revenue from letting the bush tax cuts expire on the richest, and I think it is a reasonable request since those tax cuts never produced one new job or made America a better place to live; except for those super rich who benefited from the cuts. I also understand that there can be cuts and streamlining to major government programs to make them more efficient, but let’s make sure that the cuts are made to the inefficiencies, and maintain those few things that can help the American dream live on….