Well..the new repub talking points are out and they all have one thing in common…the phrase “adult conversation” is in all of them; this coming from the “adults” that have said nothing but no…nothing but no to the needs of the country’s unemployed, nothing but no to the uninsured, nothing but no to any compromise that didn’t give them everything they and their business cronies wanted. Sounds more like the conversation of a three year old instead of an adult. I thought an adult conversation was one where people sat down and were serious about the issues and could see that are two sides, or more, to an issue and disputes can’t be resolved by one of the side just saying no, it’s going to be my way or we won’t talk…which is the way the repubs are framing the issues…shouting “no compromise” as they use all of their energy to pander to their base with utter disregard for what is best for the country.
So, let’s recognize this new set of talking points for what they are…just the newest tactic in the war to destroy the middle class and the safety net that is fast being shredded to give the rich their $370,000 tax cuts…I want to gag every time I hear these idiots.
Yeah, I know, less reasonableness than I have promised…but where has that gotten us progressives? We are still playing by the old rules that have been overwritten by the thugs in the republican party…it’s time to get a copy of that rulebook…but, I wish we didn’t have to…geez…
Well…I was going to title the one “the hypocrisy starts” but the one I used seems to describe what is happening better. Let’s start with the new repub member of the house from out east who was elected after railing about the new healthcare law and promising to repeal it. Then, this idiot goes off on congressional staffers who tell him that his “Cadillac” health benefits don’t kick in for a month….doesn’t he get it that his opposition to reform will keep 50 million Americans from having their healthcare kick in at all? Of course, these guys are so dense that they can’t see the irony of this kind of behavior…I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell.
Then you have our good buddy Rep. Mike Pence who has been on record multiple times saying that he can’t support extension of unemployment benefits for those most hurting in our society unless he gets the tax cuts for the rich extended…basically, extorting the majority of the working American people for the top 1% of earners. Don’t the rich already have enough? Another example of repub hypocrisy…getting elected by duping the middle class then screwing everyone but their rich buddies…geez…
Well….as you know, the “bipartisan” group on the deficit leaked some of it’s initial recommendations the other day and I had to laugh with the predictability of them…these idiots feel that all of the financial problems that this country faces now and in the future are the fault of people like you and me…the people that worked all their lives and expect that the commitments made to you and that you paid for through taxes be kept. They go on to state that all of the social safety nets that make this a civilized country (and that have already been shredded by the repubs) need to be reduced or eliminated or we will never reduce the deficits. They also propose that the retirement age be raised to 69 since people are living longer…but they neglect to quote the statistics that clearly show that the only increase in life expectancy is in the group of upper income people…those of us in the rest of the classes have seen life expectancy stay flat or even reduce over the past decade.
You can look at this any way you want, but I see this as just another repub tactic to give cover to their plan to continue the redistribution of wealth upwards…since there was no mention of raising taxes on the rich or corporations but cutting their taxes more..even though their tax burden is the lowest its been in more than 50 years. If you listened to any of the rhetoric coming from the right during the election (before they were silenced by their handlers) their true plans were clear…they want all of the safety nets gone..they feel they are “socialism” and trick people into not taking care of themselves.
When are we going to fight back against this nonsense? A society is not a winner-take-all proposition where the rich and powerful get all of the rewards that the economy has to offer…it is supposed to be an entity where we take care of each other and revel in the success of the least advantaged….geez…
Well…a thought has been coming to me over the past couple of days…yep, just one…so it must be a big one, huh? I think it is…and I know I’ve been pushing reasonableness in politics, that there is always room for compromise…but I think I may have been wrong. When I see the chicanery that the repubs have been doing since the election, with the instant rejection of anything Obama, with no mention of the people that are hurting in this country…but just payback and investigations of the normal workings of any government…where were these guys when Cheney was letting the oil companies write energy legislation? But that is not the point, the point to me is that even though the election was a setback, we progressives need to say stop, that we have already moved way too far to the right..just for the look of compromise that the repubs never really cared about. So, we need to use the power that is left to us, frame the consequences of the repubs agenda better…so they want to repeal the healthcare law? So they want a tax increase on small businesses by eliminating the subsidies that are included in the law? Let’s shout it from the rooftops. So, they want to allow insurance companies to cancel your insurance when you get sick? Let’s take out billboards that shout that fact. So they want to allow big banks to bet the economy on their obscene profits again? Let’s make sure that everyone knows that is what they want to do. I know, I know…that’s not reasonableness but I think the term needs to be redefined…is it reasonable to let the extreme right-wing agenda ruin this country in the name of compromise…not in my world it’s not….
Well…there is a new narrative coming out of the repubs that the reason that the dems lost the house in the mid-terms was that they didn’t compromise enough on their agenda, that they jammed the healthcare bill down the throats of America without talking to their repub counterparts. Okay, is anyone laughing as much as I am? Especially when related to healthcare, the dems went from their proposal for a single-payer system to the bastardized one that was passed…and the majority of the bill were things that the repubs had proposed just a few years earlier…so, the repubs get everything they want and then still run against the bill? But, you know their idea of compromise is that they get everything they want and then still bitch about it. They are so spineless that they won’t even support financial regulation of the guys that screwed up the economy if their idiot fringe (who doesn’t understand any of it…just listen to Michelle Bachmann) starts to howl. How can you, or why should you compromise when the only thing these guys want is a return to the robberbaron times of the early 1900′s? They’ve shown they have no good ideas and to give their stupid ones like tax cuts for the rich validity by compromising on them is the height of folly that the dems will have to get over…geez…
Well…I think I’ll keep going with a running stream-of-consciousness commentary on the day since it is an important one…I did get out to vote and it only took about 15 minutes even though my polling precinct had changed….and I have to thank the people that man the polling places and keep a smile on their faces through the crushes and the boredom. I forgot that I had finally updated my address…but the new precinct is in sight of my place so that is really convenient. I have to thank T for setting lunch for today and I think that will offset the gloom that I am feeling…but I will still believe that we can come through this as a nation…but the question is: “will it be better for folks like you and me?” If we can go by history, we are in for at least two years of gridlock and posturing where the repubs highest stated purpose is to defeat Obama in 2012. Is that any plan for governance? Nope, and we have seen they don’t care about that…my hope is that the dems (or some middle of the road third party) will take the next two years to sharpen their message that will further define what the repubs really are….and if all goes well…the repub leadership will anger the tea partiers and drive them away. The knives have already come out against Palin from the repub establishment but is Karl Rove any better? Questions, questions, questions…more later…but I may just edit this one..look in the title for stars…if you see one, I’ve added or edited…
I think a kind of resignation has set in this afternoon but the lunch and talk with T got me down off the ledge….it’s going to be a bad night so the BV will flow later and I may have to just turn the tv off and watch a couple of movies on the computer, but, being the political animal that I am, I don’t think I’ll be able to completely avoid all of the political stuff. If they lose badly….I think the Dems should scrap the healthcare plan they passed and go for broke in the lame duck session..to a single payer system that cuts the parasite insurance companies out of the loop and pays them back for the unlimited money they spent buying the government through the repubs. And, a disclosure law that forces this money to be identified…then we in the middle can make them pay in their profits; since it is the only thing they understand. More later…
Okay…here’s the last one for the day….I will say this…I like the BV…it’s one of those things that I told my kids and I have to remember….don’t worry about things until they happen…I know it’s been predicted that it will be a bloodbath for the Dems…but, I’m going to take the rest of the night off from thinking about the election…since the losses haven’t happened yet…I think the sun will still come up tomorrow…but I’m not sure…
Well…I don’t know if you caught any of the “Rally to Restore Sanity” that Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert put on today, but I found it to be funny at times (they are comedians after all), but more than that it seemed to be a friendly, reasonable response to all of the hate and venom coming from the right. And, the smiles on the faces reminded me that America can be a good place, one where there are reasonable people that can still want better for their country without having it be the all or nothing warfare that the right wants it to be. But, as you can probably predict, the right has been apoplectic that the middle would come together especially led by “entertainers” that, to them, have no right to their own opinions…conveniently forgetting that the right is led by two “entertainers”…named Beck and Limbaugh.
To get to the title…was just reading the message boards on Yahoo that followed a story about today’s event and the pure, unblinking, hatred of the right for anyone but themselves surprised even me….but do you expect any different? What kind of lives do these people have that they need to squat on these boards and spew their hate at any one that is different or thinks differently than them? Does it make them feel better to hate? I think the real problem is that the republicans have made it okay to hate again, no, have made it a requirement for their followers to hate…all Jon Stewart was trying to do was give a voice to those of us that want a return to reasonableness and compromise. Is that a reason to hate him and us? Geez…
Well…I don’t know about you but I think that the instances of just breathtaking stupidity are on the rise in our society…and it still amazes me when I hear ignorance being sold as gravitas…and the hard headed refusal to see that the lies they have been sold are not true. This little bit of revelation was spurred by an article I read in the Post this morning where one of their reporters went into one of the strong bastions of repub support…an area of Kentucky where only 14% of the voters went for Obama in 2008 and asked them why they are so angry; why they think America id going in the wrong direction. Of course, their responses were straight out of the 4 o’clock hour of Fox news…they are forcing socialism down our throats and taking away our freedom. Every time I hear that crap I just want to shout “HOW?”…how is your freedom less now than when the Bushies were wiretapping everyone in the country? Give me an example…maybe the healthcare law that doesn’t take effect until 2014? And no one seems to care that federal taxes are lower for most of the country than they were two years ago…not higher as the repub lies would have us believe…300 billion of the stimulus was TAX CUTS! Are you really so dense out there that you think that tax cuts mean higher taxes?
Let’s deal with the idea of socialism…first I think most of the people they interviewed don’t even know what socialism is…but they are sure that it is bad because they have been told that by Fox…but this whole socialism argument is trumped by the statistics of the area of Kentucky where the questions were asked..that almost 80 % of the people there live on some kind of government assistance…another case of the know-nothings shouting “keep your government hands off our Medicare”. Ignorance rules again…but with the republican party being based on ignorance, do you expect anything else? Geez….
Well…I was going to label this one “October 29th part two” but I thought better of it…because I’m going to explain a little bit why I feel so depressed about what is happening in politics today. I think part of it was the euphoria that came with the ending of the eight years of hell under ole GW and having possibilities for this country to go forward again, to have the fingers of business lifted from the scale of life, and to see that maybe, just maybe, we could have a government that governed for people like you and me. And now, for reasons that I cannot comprehend, we are poised to go right back to those bad old days…to a governmental philosophy that can be best described as by the republicans and for business; the rest of the country be damned.
I know, I learned a while ago to not let these things take so much out of me, to not get so invested in things that I can’t control, but this one feels different…it’s like this is it for the country and the resilience that we have shown over the years is coming to a end. I’ve lived through the cold war, the communist scares, mutually assured destruction, and Watergate and I have never felt that we couldn’t come back until now…this time the people have killed the idea of America….they have bought into the lies and made them the truth of their reality even when it’s not so….we are no longer in this together…and I’m so depressed…
Well…this is the second in the series of what you have to look forward to with the probable election of the repubs next week…this one deals with their promise to repeal the financial regulation bill that was passed this year. Really, they are going to go back to the wild west, free for all unregulated financial industry that cost everyone in this country but the rich and the perpetrators. Are you listening? they are going to go back to what caused the meltdown that cost almost 10 million jobs. But, hey, it only affected the middle class and the poor so why should they care? They never have so why start now?
Now let’s look at what this means..it means a return to their wonderful little world where when they bet right, they get rich, and when they bet wrong, you and I pay for it. A pretty sweet deal, huh? I’ll be you’d like to have that kind of a rigged market to take advantage of. How will this create jobs? How will this raise the wages of workers so they can share in the profits and benefits that the rich are stealing? The short answer is…it won’t…because the repubs are there for one thing and one thing only…to make themselves and their business buddies richer…that’s the simple bottom line and anything else they say is just lies…and they must be pretty good ones since a lot of people believe them. Or have people just gotten dumber over the last two years?
I have to agree with Paul Krugman…if you think things are bad now…just wait and hold your breath for the next two years…