Tag Archives: republicans

Misc

If Ford can do it, why can’t the rest?

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Well…have been thinking about this since Ford reported it’s quarterly profits in the last week or so, making it almost 6.5 billion dollars in profit through the third quarter; eclipsing all of the other automakers combined. And, guess what? They did it with union organized plants that pay a wage that keeps their workers solidly in the middle class. Take that you right wing union bashers….you that have done your best to destroy organized labor here in the US….saying that the only reason the automakers can’t or haven’t made money is the overpaid, lazy union workforce. But the question that immediately comes to my mind is: if Ford can do it, why can’t the rest? Why is it necessary for GM and Chrysler to have a two tiered wage scale that pays new workers half of what their old ones make? What is different that they can’t do what Ford does, especially when they have come through bankruptcy with little of the debt that Ford carries? I don’t think there is a difference other than, with the bad economic times, GM and Chrysler are still hanging on to the adversarial labor relationship that existed before the downturn and their management just doesn’t get that their workers are not the problem. But, with the return of the know nothing repubs…that is all we have to look forward to….they are going to keep their feet on the necks of the middle class as long as America stays so damn stupid and keeps electing them….

One other observation that just popped into my head…why are police and firefighters unions okay, but teachers and industrial unions are constant targets of the repubs. I’ve never heard them say one word about the police unions in any of the big cities that have them…so, again, if unions are so bad, why are police and firefighters given a pass by the repubs? Just asking….

Politics

The last week of sanity…

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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…

Politics

Nobody’s fault but ours….

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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…

Politics

The Dems got played…

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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…

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

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

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….

Misc

Let’s end this tax cut nonsense…

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Well…have to clear a few things up this morning…you may have gotten the wrong idea from some of my previous posts that I’m just a run of the mill tax and spend liberal type…but that is not correct. I do believe that government has a role as referee between the people and the overwhelming force of the rich and business, but I don’t believe that the government is always right and always does the right thing. There have been many examples of pork on the right and left where politicians have used tax revenues as their own personal piggy bank and to reward the people and businesses in their districts. If these outlays are for the common good, then I can see where they are necessary but projects like the “bridge to nowhere” and increasing spending on the military industrial complex in the face of this deep recession is not something that should continue.

With that said, I need to get to the tax cut nonsense that is still being pushed by the right, in the face of all credible economic analysis telling us that these cuts did nothing to stimulate the economy in the years they were in place but cost us 700 billion dollars a year in revenue. One thing that the right will not tell you, or doesn’t want to emphasize in their attacks on the stimulus package is that a third of it was tax cuts…that’s over 250 billion dollars of tax cuts in the 860 billion package. In one breath they tell us that the stimulus failed and in the next they say that the only way to save jobs and grow the economy is more tax cuts that they just said don’t work. Is anyone else’s head about to explode with this blatant and cynical attempt to have if both ways? I know, I’ve talked about this before, but my ire was aroused by the new ads here in Michigan that keep repeating “the failed stimulus package” in attacks on the Dems here…while it is hard to prove prevention of the loss of jobs by the stimulus, it is not hard to look at the data and know that the rosiest projection of jobs created by tax cuts was under 1 million…over 8 years…compare that to the 22 million created when there was a sensible tax policy during the Clinton years.

Another tactic from the right that I want to deal with today is their method of calculating the cost of each job saved for the dollar outlay from the stimulus package; with those costs being estimated at wildly differing rates of 2 to 20 million dollars per job; but we know how bad the right is at math…they don’t believe in science so why should they believe in math? Well…that’s not quite fair, but lets look at the 3.7 trillion dollar total cost of the Bush tax cuts and compare it to the optimistic estimates of 1 million jobs added while the tax cuts were in force. Then, let’s compare that to the the 860 billion dollar cost and the generally agreed on number that there were 2.5 million jobs saved by the spending of the stimulus…don’t even have to be good at math to see that the tax cuts are a far more expensive way to create jobs…so, let’s end this nonsense once and for all…geez…