What can that maniac be thinking?

The reason for this holiday...(edited to correct the link)

2012-01-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

Thank you forever, Dr. King.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs

2012-01-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

From http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2012/01/republicans-dont-care-about-voter-fraud

Iowa Republicans are trying to dismiss claims that the vote count in Tuesday’s Iowa Caucus was wrong. An Iowa voter told a local TV station yesterday that he noticed a 20-vote discrepancy in the count – and that Rick Santorum was the real winner of the Caucuses. Republican Party officials, though, are sticking to their first count – showing Mitt Romney as the winner by 8-votes - and there will be no recount.The Republican Party has launched a war on voters around the nation this year with strict new laws that will disenfranchise over 5 million Americans. They claim these laws are necessary to combat so-called voter fraud. Yet in Iowa – where there are no such laws – and where a very, very close and questionable election was just held – Republicans don’t seem to care at all about getting it right. Clearly – the war on voters isn’t about making sure the people’s voices are represented accurately – it’s about making sure poor people, young people, and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats – can’t vote at all.

A worthy cause - Help me get to Carnegie Hall!

2011-12-29T12:19:00.000-08:00

As several of you know, I'm part of a mass choir (300+ voices) that will be performing at world-famous Carnegie Hall on Feb 19th. By going to this site, you can help us get there.For a sample of what we sound like, look HERE.

Prayer in School?

2011-12-09T09:39:00.001-08:00

Big thanks to my friend Steve Woodward for this.Dear John,As you know, We've been working real hard in our town to get prayer back in our schools. Finally, the school board approved a plan of teacher-led prayer with the children participating at their own option. Children not wishing to participate were to be allowed to stand out in the hallway during prayer time. We hoped someone would sue us so we could go all the way to the Supreme Court and get the old devil-inspired ruling reversed.Naturally, we were all excited by the school board action. As you know, our own little Billy (not so little, any more though) is now in the second grade. Of course, Margaret and I explained to him no matter what the other kids did, he was going to stay in the classroom and participate.After the first day of school, I asked him "How did the prayer time go?""Fine.""Did many kids go out into the hallway?""Two"."Excellent. How did you like your teacher's prayer?""It was different, Dad. Real different from the way you pray.""Oh? Like how?""She said, 'Hail Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners...'"The next day I talked with the principal. I politely explained I wasn't prejudiced against Catholics but I would appreciate Billy being transferred to a non-Catholic teacher. The principal said it would be done right away.At supper that evening I asked Billy to say the blessings. He slipped out of his chair, sat cross- legged, closed his eyes, raised his hand palms up in the air and began to hum.You'd better believe I was at the principal's office at eight o'clock the next morning. "Look," I said. 'I don't really know much about these Transcendental Meditationists, but I would feel a lot more comfortable If you could move Billy to a room where the teacher practices an older, more established religion."That afternoon I met Billy as soon as he walked in the door after school."I don't think you're going to like Mrs. Nakasone's prayer either, Dad.""Out with it.""She kept chanting Namu Amida Butsu..."The following morning I was waiting for the principal in the school parking lot. "Look, I don't want my son praying to the Eternal Spirit of whatever to Buddha. I want him to have a teacher who prays in Jesus' name!""What about Bertha Smith?""Excellent."I could hardly wait to hear about Mrs. Smith's prayer. I was standing on the front steps of the school when the final bell rang."Well?" I asked Billy as we walked towards the car."Okay.""Okay what?""Mrs. Smith asked God to bless us and ended her prayer in Jesus' name, amen just like you."I breathed a sigh of relief. "Now we're getting some place.""She even taught us a verse of scripture about prayer," said Billy.I beamed. "Wonderful. What was the verse?""Lets see..." he mused for a moment. "And behold, they began to pray; and they did pray unto Jesus, calling him their Lord and their God."We had reached the car. "Fantastic," I said reaching for the door handle. Then paused. I couldn't place the scripture. "Billy, did Mrs. Smith say what book that verse was from?""Third Nephi, chapter 19, verse 18.""Nephi what?""Nephi," he said. "It's in the Book of Mormon.The school board doesn't meet for a month. I've given Billy very definite instructions that at prayer time each day he's to go out into the hallway. I plan to be at that board meeting. If they don't do something about this situation, I'll sue. I'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to. I don't need schools or anybody else teaching my son about religion. We can take care of that ourselves at home and at church, thank you very much.Best Wishes Always,Dan

When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?

2011-11-22T19:13:00.000-08:00

When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?

Capitalism, Socialism, "Job Creators", and what Conservatives miss about ALL of them

2011-11-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

Conservatives have shown their off-kilter view of the world by refashioning definitions of words and terms in order to create entirely new connotations. Socialism is now defined as a "government take over"; Capitalism is now completely and utterly patriotic, and the wealthy are now defined as "job creators". But you can redefine all you want - it's not going to change the true meaning of these terms one whit.CONSERVATIVE-ESE:Socialism = Government takeover of all industries.ACTUAL FACT: Socialism does not mean the abolition of a free market society, nor does Socialism call for a government takeover of all industry. That would atcually be Communism, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the former Soviet Union for clearly demonstrating how monstrously unworkable it is. The Socialist acknowledges that the free market is good, but limited, and believes that some industries should not be run for profit. Police protection, fire protection, prisons, education, health care, parks, electricity, water supplies, waste and sewage removal, and roadways are just a few examples of industries which should not be run for profit. Why? When these industries are operating for profit, not only will prices rise, but corresponding services would then be reserved only for those who can afford them. Or more succinctly, no one person should be able to profit over running services from which everyone benefits. One excellent example of how Socialism can at times beat the free market can be found in our banking industry. While most banks operate for the profits of their stockholders (most of whom are not customers of the bank) and CEOs (paying said CEOs GINORMOUS amounts of money), credit unions are owned and operated by their members. The money that ISN'T paid to CEOs are reflected back to the customer in higher interest rates for investments, lower interest rates on loans, and a nominal dividend to the member/customer, which usually gets reinvested right back into the credit union as a deposit. It's worth pointing out that credit unions did not run the same risks as banks when our financial bubble burst, and thus did not request nor receive any TARP bailout money. Nor have the credit unions contributed to the morass of fraudulent foreclosures that the banks have. Another example: health care. The free market creates for-profit businesses ranging from medications, medical testing, medical treatments, medical research, to hospitals. None of these have lowered the cost of health care through innovation or through competition. This is because the demand for health care is a basic necessity; it's non-negotiable. Like clean water & air, humans cannot survive without such products or services. The demand for these is a constant, therefore they are not subjected to the law of supply and demand. When prices go up, demand does not lessen beyond a certain threshold. Where the free market brings economic ups and downs which effects everyone, Socialism believes that there is a limit on the protections a free market provides for everyday citizens. And quite simply, some things should not be run for profit, especially at the expense of everyone else.CONSERVATIVE-ESE: Capitalism is pure good, and if you oppose it in any way, you are Un-American.FACT:Capitalism is an economic term for the free market system which is structured upon the accumulation of money, where the means of production are privately owned and operates for profit. Capitalism is neither right nor wrong, it is simply an economic term. Nor is Capitalism patriotic! A system which encourages the accumulation of wealth does not salute a flag, nor is it loyal to a native country. This market system crosses state and national borders in order to provide larger profits for business owners. If labor costs are cheaper overseas, then it is capitalism which will drive businesses out of our country. If a company finds it cheaper to produce a dangerous product than it is to produce a safe one, it is capitalism which will produce the most profitable option without consideration of customer safety. Capitalism only seeks profits and will by nature migrate operations towards areas which promotes greater profits. Capitalism has no allegiance to any one country as it operates in a global economy. Again, capitalism has no allegiance with patriotism. Where would a business find themselves most profitable? Would they find a country with extremely lower labor costs to be more profitable for manufacturing than a country with higher labor costs? Would they find a lower taxed area more profitable than an area with high demand for their products? But most of all, wouldn’t it be more patriotic for an American business to spark demand in order to operate, manufacture and sell their goods or services inside America, as opposed to overseas?CONSERVATIVE-ESE:The wealthiest among us are the Job Creators.FACT:The wealthy are not necessarily the job creators. Poor and desperate innovators have sparked many new business ventures despite their lack of wealth. Many small businesses began out of practically nothing, but only an idea executed inside of their garages. (Anybody ever hear of Apple? Hewlett-Packard?) The fact of the matter is that neither wealth nor lower taxes create jobs; only demand creates jobs, as I have stated elsewhere. This little tidbit of truth is lost in translation when the wealthy are deemed as “Job Creators”. All this is is a ploy designed to promote additional tax breaks for those who have more than enough while at the same time promoting cuts in public services for those who do not have enough. Another tidbit of truth which is diluted in this argument is the inequality of income between the workers and the owners. A CEO today typically earns 343 times more than an average employee - up from 30 times more in the 1950s - when top tax rates were around 90%! Did CEOs become THAT much more valuable? And while 88% of domestic profits go to corporate bank accounts and CEO bonuses, only 1% of these profits gets applied towards labor. The business owner shoulders no responsibility for producing any product or service. Rather the business owner invested their money (and in most cases time) into a business which is productive. Productivity is a result of the balance between the investors, the managers, and the workers. It is a symbiotic relationship, which many Americans cannot conceive of. For where would any business be without any one of these three elements? Despite conservative talking points, even the lowest of employees is an invaluable asset to a business. In a restaurant, an effective business owner knows that the dishwasher and busboys are just as important to their operation as their managers and customers. If you remove the dishwasher and/or busboys from the equation, the business suffers. Yet an effective manager can be absent from their responsibilities and the operation may not not suffer. So which employee should be valued more than the other, the laborer, the manager, or the investor? The answer is neither of the three. For without one, the other two would not have a business operate or a job to tend to. Yet the argument goes that only the wealthy create jobs. Without enough demand, even these jobs won’t last very long.Conservatives are actually correct that we should not tax our job creators in a time of economic recession. But they've BADLY misidentified exactly who these job creators are. When our recession is being prolonged out of a lack of demand, it is not the business owner who can create jobs; rather it is consumers who create jobs by spurring demand. So let’s not overburden our true job creator, the consumer. In order to spark higher demand, we must effect the largest target market we have at our disposal. It’s not the wealthy who can spark this demand; they only constitute up to 2% of our populace. Rather, we should focus our attention on the other 98% of our populace, our struggling middle class and poor. Henry Ford understood this well - he believed that his product meant nothing unless he had customers who could afford to purchase it. In order to ensure his company’s success, he paid his laborers more than other businesses, so they could buy his cars. This enabled his employees to comfortably afford to buy Ford products. This sparked higher demand, which in turn produced higher job growth, which led to Ford’s success story. Henry Ford did not believe in paying the least amount possible for labor, eliminating the minimum wage, or acquiring higher profits at the expense of his workforce. Instead he realized the symbiosis between business and labor and between business and customer.And not only did Ford boost his OWN business - by paying his own workers more, he forced other businesses to boost worker pay lest they lose their employees. This increase in salaries boosted consumer demand across the board, beginning the economic boom that culminated in the Roaring '20s.

Jim Hightower | Rising public anger explained in daily headlines

2011-11-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

Jim Hightower | Rising public anger explained in daily headlines

A VERY worthy cause (NOT political for once!)

2011-08-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

Hey, guys. Something VERY worthwhile that my friend Randy Blair is doing up in Michigan, raising money to help fight ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease. Check it out here, and donate if you can - spread the word if you can't.
http://bit.ly/alsdesmond

"Fiscal Responsibility", my FOOT!

2011-08-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

Shamelessly stolen from Steve Benen:

"1980: Ronald Reagan runs for president, promising a balanced budget

1981 - 1989: With support from congressional Republicans, Reagan runs enormous deficits, adds $2 trillion to the debt.

1993: Bill Clinton passes economic plan that lowers deficit, gets zero votes from congressional Republicans.

1998: U.S. deficit disappears for the first time in three decades. Debt clock is unplugged.

2000: George W. Bush runs for president, promising to maintain a balanced budget.

2001: CBO shows the United States is on track to pay off the entirety of its national debt within a decade.

2001 - 2009: With support from congressional Republicans, Bush runs enormous deficits, adds nearly $5 trillion to the debt.

2002: Dick Cheney declares, “Deficits don’t matter.” Congressional Republicans agree, approving tax cuts, two wars, and Medicare expansion without even trying to pay for them.

2009: Barack Obama inherits $1.3 trillion deficit from Bush; Republicans immediately condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

2009: Congressional Democrats unveil several domestic policy initiatives — including health care reform, cap and trade, DREAM Act — which would lower the deficit. GOP opposes all of them, while continuing to push for deficit reduction.

September 2010: In Obama’s first fiscal year, the deficit shrinks by $122 billion. Republicans again condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.

October 2010: S&P endorses the nation’s AAA rating with a stable outlook, saying the United States looks to be in solid fiscal shape for the foreseeable future.

November 2010: Republicans win a U.S. House majority, citing the need for fiscal responsibility.

December 2010: Congressional Republicans demand extension of Bush tax cuts, relying entirely on deficit financing. GOP continues to accuse Obama of fiscal irresponsibility.

March 2011: Congressional Republicans declare intention to hold full faith and credit of the United States hostage — a move without precedent in American history — until massive debt-reduction plan is approved.

July 2011: Obama offers Republicans a $4 trillion debt-reduction deal. GOP refuses, pushes debt-ceiling standoff until the last possible day, rattling international markets.

August 2011: S&P downgrades U.S. debt, citing GOP refusal to consider new revenues. Republicans rejoice and blame Obama for fiscal irresponsibility.

There have been several instances since the mid 1990s in which I genuinely believed Republican politics couldn’t possibly get more blisteringly ridiculous. I was wrong; they just keep getting worse."

Is there ONE adult left in the GOP?!?

2011-07-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

You certainly wouldn't know it from the way the debt ceiling business has gone on...

A simple procedure that was little more than a rubber stamp while Ronald Reagan was tripling the National Debt - and George W. Bush was doubling it - has suddenly become THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD.

To understand what it's all about, read this.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the debt ceiling has been increased by Congress 74 times since 1962. On average, that's about 3 times every couple of years. Under George W. Bush, it was raised 10 times in 8 years. We never heard about it. But now a Black guy is President. Makes you wonder...

But once again, the Republican Party is REALLY hoping you have a short memory. When Americans blamed Republicans for the government shut down in 1995, one would think the GOP learned their lesson. But the eternally short memories of Republicans and their apparent inability to deal in historical fact once again compels them to try something that failed. What is it about the GOP that makes them believe that they can hold America hostage?

As the debt ceiling deadline approaches, Republicans are once again sticking to their guns, refusing any and all deals that include tax increases on the wealthiest Americans.

BIG surprise (rolls eyes).

I have continually said for over a decade that, unless you make over $250K/year,Republicans do not give a damn about you - they seem hell-bent on proving me right.

Their recklessness and general irresponsibility over that span of time has put us in the economic situation we are currently in and once again they are willing to dig us deeper into economic calamity. It’s as if they think that a recession isn’t enough, that what they really want is a second Great Depression.

If Americans weren't clear about Republican intent before, they damn well better have clarity now. The Republicans have thrown hissy fit after hissy fit over the insistence of Democrats (and over 2/3 of the American people) that raising taxes on the wealthy and closing tax loopholes on large corporations be part of any debt ceiling deal. Their refusal to agree to revenue increases of ANY KIND means that they are negotiating in bad faith. President Obama, despite taking heat from his own party, put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table and that still wasn’t good enough for the GOP. As the President stated earlier, Can Republicans say yes to anything? Republicans expect Democrats to cave in and givhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife Republicans everything they want, and at the same time refuse to give Democrats anything in return. It’s a dishonest and dangerous game. It reminds me much of Yasser Arafat in 2000 - the Israelis made him an offer that gave the Palestinians over 90% of what he said he wanted, and he walked away, throwing Middle East peace away with both hands. That is precisely what Speaker Boehner is doing to the US Economy.

Republicans are already trying desperately to lay the blame at the feet of the Democratic Party in an attempt to spin away from the fact that they have been intentionally sabotaging the economy for political and personal gain. Eric Cantor is set to gain financially if the economy crashes and it is likely that many other Republicans have something to gain as well. They have made bets that the United States will fail, and they are doing everything they can to bring it to ruin. The Republican Party is using fear over the economy to advance their agenda and gain power. Their main goal is to make President Obama fail and has been since the day he won in 2008.

That’s why they won’t say yes.

But their plan is beginning to backfire.

As things get worse, the American citizenry is waking up to realize that the Democrats are the adults in Washington and that Republicans are acting like children that can’t have everything their way. Speaker John Boehner rejected a grand bargain that would have required compromise from both sides. He has also claimed that Democrats haven’t offered anything, which is a flat-out lie. Eric Cantor stormed out of the debt talks simply because taxes were brought up. Mitch McConnell continues to accuse Democrats of not negotiating in good faith. But all Democrats have asked for is that the wealthy pay only a bit more in taxes and that the tax subsidies for Big Oil and other corporate tax loopholes come to an end.

Republicans have continually sided with corporations and the wealthiest 2% of Americans. They have spent all of their time in Congress tearing down programs that benefit the other 98% of the American people. They have managed to spend every single moment in the House of Representatives focusing on their social agenda and have not spent any time on jobs and the economy. In fact, they have contributed to the unemployment rate by slashing government jobs and have destroyed jobs that depend on government funding such as Planned Parenthood. Their biggest campaign issue in 2010 was job creation, and now they don’t want to take it seriously.

When August 2nd arrives and America defaults, it will absolutely, no doubt about it, be the fault of the Republican Party. When Social Security checks fail to go out, senior citizens WILL notice. When our men and women in uniform go unpaid for their sacrifices, they WILL notice. And when businesses come to a standstill because the government shuts down, small business owners and even greedy CEOs WILL notice. And who will they all blame you ask? Surveys are showing that most Americans will blame the GOP for a government shut down. 71% of Americans disapprove of Congressional Republicans. And even if Congress kicks the can down the road, Republicans will still be blamed for not negotiating in good faith and for their irresponsible political posturing on behalf of the wealthy and corporations that results in no real solution to the big issue. Republicans are ignoring the vast majority of the American people at their own peril and may even take heat from their own masters since their profits ultimately depend upon a stable economy. Default is not good for anyone in these troubled times and Republicans are only making things worse (as usual).

The Republicans had the spending cuts they wanted on the table and they rejected them solely on the grounds that their corporate masters would see an increase in taxes. The way I see it, if the Republicans got the spending cuts they demanded, Democrats should get to close some tax loopholes for the rich like they’ve demanded. Of course in a perfect world, Democrats would take Social Security and Medicare off the table, and replace them with cuts to defense instead. The silver lining in all of this is that Republicans will get the blame. They actually believed that history wouldn’t repeat itself and that they could turn the tables on the Democrats this time. But just like they were in 1995, Republicans are being stubborn, uncompromising, and insensitive to the majority of Americans that demand a raise in taxes. As long as Republicans continue to demand spending cuts and reject revenue increases, they are finished politically and THAT is without a doubt something to look forward to, as this version of the GOP needs to go down HARD and be replaced by adults.

Happy 4th of July!

2011-07-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here's why we celebrate:

The Unanimous Declaration
of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Happy 4th of July Weekend!

2011-07-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

A pretty amazing video on America - how far we've come and how far we have yet to go to "form a more perfect Union":
http://youtu.be/j9apMRjugSA
I especially like REPUBLICAN Presidents Reagan and Bush43 speaking on religious freedom.

Wow - a Republican talking SENSE...

2011-06-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

...too bad she'll be labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and run out of the party on a rail.

Her name is Nancy Argenziano, and she served as a Republican state representative and state senator in Florida whose districts included Citrus County. After serving in the Legislature, she served on the Florida Public Service Commission.
Here's some of what she had to say:
"Make no mistake: This is not about liberals vs. conservatives — or Republicans vs. Democrats; it’s about what is right and what is wrong. The legislation and policies of the governor and legislative leadership are wrong.

It’s about shouting a warning to Floridians that their elected leaders are selling them down the river, saying one thing, but doing another.

In my 16 years in the Florida House, state Senate and Public Service Commission, I have tried to inform people about what was going on in their government and provided the inside scoop that political leaders did not want you to know about. I have been warning for years, and providing examples of our representative government/democracy being sold to the highest contributors, the slush funds, the corruption — that it really is about money.

I have been a Republican, and believe in the Republican principles of long ago: Less government in my private life; don’t tax us to death; personal freedom; personal responsibility; the right to protect myself and family; and for allowing business to do what it does best — do business, without excessive or unnecessary regulations.

But, contrary to the current crop of Republican leaders, I do not want Halliburton in charge of the Pentagon, BP heading up the Department of Environmental Protection, or Enron making energy policy.

In recent years I have seen much corruption; so much so that a grand jury ranked Florida No. 1 in corruption.

I have a problem with those who have hijacked the Republican Party to use it for their own self gain; those who wouldn’t have a clue what a Republican platform is and who have mutated the “R” philosophy beyond recognition.

I take offense that they use the hard-working grassroots level Republicans to help promote a philosophy that they do not practice. Many good Republicans who worked hard for this party have written books telling us what was happening, apparently to no avail. It cannot be that all that matters is that our side wins at any cost. I refuse to believe anyone could not see the harm in doing that."

See the rest of Ms. Argenziano's impressive rant here.

John McCain to Bush apologists: Stop lying about Bin Laden and torture

2011-05-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

From yesterday's Washigton Post:

Senator John McCain has become - again - the John McCain of 2000, whom I could easily have voted for. THIS John McCain calls it like he sees it, and yesterday in an Op-Ed, McCain slammed the claim that the killing of Osama Bin Laden somehow vindicates the "enhanced interrogation" methods of the Bush administration. But he went even further. As the Post's Greg Sargent writes:

...on the Senate floor, he uncorked a new broadside that is quite remarkable, taking direct aim at Bush apologists who are reviving this debate in order to claim Bin Laden’s death as part of the Bush legacy.

McCain amplified his case, and called on former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey — whose recent op ed claiming torture led to Bin Laden has been widely cited by the right — to retract his claims. McCain’s speech is worth quoting at length:

“With so much misinformation being fed into such an essential public debate as this one, I asked the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta, for the facts. And I received the following information:

“The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. We did not first learn from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the real name of bin Laden’s courier, or his alias, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the man who ultimately enabled us to find bin Laden. The first mention of the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as well as a description of him as an important member of Al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country. The United States did not conduct this detainee’s interrogation, nor did we render him to that country for the purpose of interrogation. We did not learn Abu Ahmed’s real name or alias as a result of waterboarding or any ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ used on a detainee in U.S. custody. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts, or an accurate description of his role in Al-Qaeda.

“In fact, not only did the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed; it actually produced false and misleading information. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married, and ceased his role as an Al-Qaeda facilitator — which was not true, as we now know. All we learned about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti through the use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the confirmation of the already known fact that the courier existed and used an alias.

“I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden — was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’

“In short, it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden. (emphasis mine - DM) I hope former Attorney General Mukasey will correct his misstatement. It’s important that he do so because we are again engaged in this important debate, with much at stake for America’s security and reputation. Each side should make its own case, but do so without making up its own facts (emphasis again mine -DM).

This is taking on the makings of an old-fashioned, barn-burning senatorial crusade, and it’s unclear if anyone of McCain’s stature is going to step up and make the pro-torture case. For all his flaws, McCain carries great authority on this issue because of his own past experiences.

It’s becoming clearer that despite the Obama administration’s desire to avoid relitigating the torture debate, this is precisely the time to do it. The emerging evidence is on the side of torture opponents: A careful and extensive New York Times investigation concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in tracking down Bin Laden. Beyond this, the larger dynamic is perfect: The president that has been widely derided by the right as weak for ending torture tracked down and killed the world’s most wanted terrorist. That’s a pretty strong starting point for this argument.

Republican Senators are apparently set to grill David Petraeus and Leon Panetta at their confirmation hearings over torture’s role in getting Bin Laden. So in addition to McCain’s increasingly high profile on the issue, we may soon see the popular Petraeus reiterating his opposition to torture in a high-visibility setting — after the Obama administration killed America’s number one terrorist foe. Gettin’ mighty interesting.

Here is video of McCain's entire speech: pretty lengthy, but the part Sargent quotes is about 5:40 in.

Here's a radical thought on national security:

2011-05-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

National Security policy that ISN'T focused on the military or counterterrorism.

The product of a left-wing think tank?

That's what I would have expected.

But the authors of the study? A US Navy Captain and a Marine Lt. Colonel!

From the paper:
"We cannot isolate our own prosperity and security from the global system. Even in a land as rich as ours, we too, have seen the gradual breakdown of rural communities and the rapid expansion of our cities. We have experienced migration, crime, and domestic terrorism. We struggle with joblessness and despite a low rate of illiteracy, we are losing our traditional role of innovation dominance in leading edge technologies and the sciences. We are, in the truest sense, part of an interdependent strategic ecosystem, and our interests converge with those of people in virtually every corner of the world. We must remain cognizant of this, and reconcile our domestic and foreign policies as being complementary and largely congruent."

These officers are suggesting that the stronger the US is at home, the stronger it is abroad. And they're exactly right. We need to focus on education, infrastucture improvement, etc. in order to keep our position as Top Dog.

Such we are, despite the alarm bells being rung by the declinists. Those bells have been effective - 47% of Americans believe China is the world's #1 economy, according to a National Journal poll conducted last year.

That's not even close.

Today the U.S. economy is still 2 1/2 times larger than the Chinese economy with only 1/6 of the population. Their per capita GDP is 1/20 of ours. And they're not going to be putting the screws to us over our debt anytime soon, either - we are, by FAR, their #1 export customer - they try to destroy our economy, theirs goes down the drain first!

This is one of the reasons I lean to the left - most conservatives have far too simplistic a worldview, and fail to take into accouint the complexity of the modern world.

A socioeconomic theory:

2011-04-19T19:34:00.001-07:00

(Big shout-out to "Ishkur" at FARK.com for this - Spot-on, IMO)

I have a theory. A socio-economic theory. This theory explains all the crime, all the corruption, all the social and moral decay, all the ills and pitfalls in a system that plague us daily, from crooked cops to white collar criminals to homeless drug addicts on the street. I call it Ishkur's General Theory of Inequitable Distribution of Affluence.

It's a basic premise. In every system, there are rich people, and there are poor people. And there is a gap between these two. The wider this gap, the more problems you have. Everything evil, immoral, degrading, corrupt and criminal stems from the size of this gap. The smaller this gap, the better everything is.

Now, that doesn't mean the goal is to eliminate the gap completely. You can never get rid of the gap, and for economic prosperity's sake you don't want to get rid of it. That's socialism/communism, and it leads to stagnation, misery and despair. We've all been there. Likewise, you don't want the gap to get too large. That leads to feudalism, human property, and more misery and despair (except for a chosen few). We've all been there too.

The trick is to find a happy medium by which the rich can stay rich enough to foster investment, growth and employment, but not too rich that they suck up all the money and the poor are literally dying of starvation in the streets (see France, 1789).

Now, the poor: They may be poor, but they need to have money. In fact, poor people should be as well off as possible without driving up the prices of things. When Henry Ford built his first factories, he did something crazy: He paid his workers $8/day, which was an incredible amount of money in those days. His friends in the business sector were aghast, and threatened him to reduce the wages. They feared that he would drive up the median income of workers in all factories across the board, and that just didn't sit well with them. At the next business summit Ford calmly told them, "Gentlemen, if I do not pay my workers $8 a day, there will be no one with any money to buy my cars."

Henry Ford understood that poor people need money to buy the consumer crap the rich people hire them to make. So you want affluence on both sides of the divide, and only the way to do that is to have a really fat middle-class.

In economics, it doesn't matter who has the money or where it's going, so long as it keeps moving. The purpose of money is to change hands; it's supposed to be spent. When money is not spent, it stays in the same place and doesn't do anything useful or help anyone, and that's bad.

This is why supply-side economics (aka Reagonomics) was such an abject failure: The belief that if you give money to rich people, they will use it to build factories and hire labor and make everyone around them wealthy via a model insultingly referred to as "trickle-down". That didn't happen, for a number of reasons. For one thing, money does not create jobs -- demand for work creates jobs. If there is no work to be done, no employer will feel compelled to hire more labor no matter how much money he has (and besides, if the work is out there, no employer has ever not found the money to hire. Even if they are flat broke. They will take out loans, raise venture capital, apply for grants and subsidies, sell shares, or do whatever it takes to find the money to hire, but just giving it to them will not make the jobs magically appear). And secondly, none of it trickled down. Instead, the rich only spent it on each other, re-investing in their own companies, capitalizing in others, and driving the stock market through the stratosphere (contrary to popular belief, a roaring stock exchange is not entirely an indicator of overall economic health; it's only an indication of the wealth of its participants, who number comparatively few to the vast majority of Americans who have little to no net worth or savings to speak of). This widened the gap, which, according to Ishkur's General Theory of Inequitable Distribution of Affluence -- IGTIDA for short -- is bad.

When there's a lot of money at the top, that means there is less money at the bottom -- really the best place where money can do some good and make a difference. There is no change in a person's standard of living between 1 billion and 2 billion dollars. But the difference between $10,000 and $20,000 can completely change someone's station in life.

(and before you interject, yes, I know that wealth creation is not a zero-sum game, but it also doesn't exist in a vacuum either. If someone makes a lot of money really quickly, that means people elsewhere lost some money, especially after inflation sets in)

The truth is the poor in America don't have any money at all, and haven't had any for several decades or so. The rich solved this problem by lending out credit to the poor so they can continue consuming at their current rate, essentially replacing money with plastic, racking up record amounts of debt. This has been happening since the 80s, and it's going to collapse sooner or later (especially after the Boomers retire, en masse, within the next 10-15 years).

If you want to solve society's ills, stop crime, fix the economy and end corruption, one thing needs to be done: The rich must get poorer, and the poor must get richer. The gap must get smaller. I know that is never going to happen in America, though. Not without some torches and pitchforks.

Gap. Disparity. An inequitable distribution of affluence. The money is in one location for too long, and it is not moving. All problems stem from it."

Just to illustrate the point...

2011-04-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

Remember the other day when I said "we don't have a spending problem, we have a REVENUE problem"?
Well this illustration will show you what I'm talking about when I say you and I are being made to pay for GE and ilk:

As David Callahan writes:

But I doubt that there is a single top tax attorney or chief financial officer in the country who was all that surprised. You see, these people are denizens of Loophole Land – a very different place than W-2ville where most Americans live.

In Loophole Land, nothing is quite as it seems. Yes, there is a top corporate tax rate of 35 percent, but it is well understood that nobody actually pays that. On the contrary, many companies pay nothing at all.

How can this be?

For starters, Loophole Land has no national borders and so it is easy to shift money around in ways that avoid taxes. General Electric works all over the world, and under tax law, it isn’t taxed on its foreign profits as long as it says that it is reinvesting those profits abroad. Many companies become expert at shifting profits abroad to foreign subsidiaries in low-tax or no-tax nations. In 2008, Goldman Sachs, had 29 subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens and reported profits of over $2 billion. It paid federal taxes of just $14 million on those profits.

Loophole Land is also a place where past business losses are never, ever forgotten. So, for instance, if you run a giant conglomerate with a profit-hungry credit division that makes a lot of stupid loans to people who can’t pay them back, fear not: you’ll be able to write off those losses – in effect getting ordinary taxpayers to subsidize your gambling debts. General Electric is widely seen as a manufacturing company. But up to half of its profits during the Bush years came from its large consumer lending business, GE Capital, and that business suffered huge losses during the crash – reportedly $32 billion. Now we are all helping GE foot the bill for that unlucky streak.

So, if you're feeling like you're barely able to keep your head above water financially, and you don't have as much money as you used to, you're right! Tax policy over the past 30 years has been designed to shift the tax burden off corporations and the wealthy, dumping it onto - you guessed it -

US.

Now consider that GE got $4B of OUR money in subsidies.

With all this, if you DON'T think our tax structure needs radical reform - YESTERDAY - then I can recommend a good Psychologist for your delusional disorder.

This from ...FOX?!?!

2011-04-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

See it here:

"There’s a reason why it’s illegal to unjustifiably yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Motivated by fear, crowds can do very dangerous things.

And yet here we are allowing Congress to dangerously cut federal spending on which we all rely because, when Wall Street lobbyists yelled, “Fire!” about the state of our nation’s budget, we believed them. And now we are letting Congress literally trample on our future.

There is no Social Security crisis. And the extent of the federal budget crisis as a whole is being wildly overblown to scare us toward drastic measures rather than rational solutions.

We are being manipulated to give government handouts to the very same big banks and corporate scam artists that crashed our economy in the first place. We are told that what is good for big business is good for America. But these so-called “job creators” are only creating jobs for yacht manufacturers and maids. Check the math. The profits of our nation’s (and the world’s) largest corporations are rising, as are the salaries and bonuses paid to executives. Are they creating jobs? No.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I think Wal-Mart is hiring if you’re willing to work for $7.78 and hour.

Yet big corporations and their lobbyists have literally been manipulating our government --- both Republicans and Democrats --- to grease the wheels for big business while putting up more and more obstacles for working families, small business owners, homeowners, etc. Yes, working families’ taxes are too high and yes, small business owners struggle under too much bureaucracy. But not big business and the super rich. No, our government is literally designed for their advantage.

And so, at their behest, politicians of both parties --- as well as the media owned by the very same big businesses --- tell us that the government is broke and our debt level is unsustainable and, therefore, we’re going to have to cut things like unemployment benefits and funding for public school teachers. Wall Street doesn’t care. They can afford private schools. But what are you going to do when your child literally doesn’t have a classroom?

There’s a reason the Founding Fathers designed things so that the federal government can borrow money and carry debt --- because, at times like these, that’s precisely what’s needed. When the economy recovers, the debt is resolved. For instance, economist Dean Baker writes:

"In spite of the deficit hawks' whining, history and financial markets tell us that the deficit and debt levels that we are currently seeing are not a serious problem. The current projections show that even ten years out on our current course the ratio of debt to GDP will be just over 90 percent. The ratio of debt to GDP was over 110 percent after World War II. Instead of impoverishing the children of that era, the three decades following World War II saw the most rapid increase in living standards in the country's history."

Instead, big business interests lobbied for the extension of monstrous tax giveaways to the super rich, which literally starved the government. And then they turn around and say government is broke and can’t afford to help poor and working families who are really struggling. It’s like Wall Street took a bat to our collective head and then turned around and said, “Oh, you look hurt!”

Similarly, Social Security isn’t in crisis. If you ignore the “sky is falling” fear-mongering long enough, you’ll quickly learn that Social Security is fully paid for through the next 30 years and considered sustainably solvent beyond that based on current revenue levels. If revenues go up (meaning, if the economy improves), Social Security will be in an even better position.

Yet there are some who want to manufacture a crisis to ram through an ideological agenda. Wall Street has wanted to privatize Social Security for years --- not because they give a damn about improving our quality of life in retirement but because they want to get rich off the fees they could charge. For decades, big business has wanted to gauge workers of wages and benefits and undermine the right to collectively bargain. From Wisconsin to Ohio and elsewhere, they’re using the “fiscal crisis” as a fig leaf excuse to do so.

It’s a simple formula: Make a big fuss that the system is broken and that “reform” is needed to fix it. But in case after case, monied interests are using that formula to actually break things that were never broken --- to help themselves and hurt you.

Wall Street could tell the truth --- that they royally and recklessly screwed up and are too busy continuing to hoard profits rather than stimulate growth, and the only way to recharge our economy is with robust, public spending that creates demand. Ah, but that would only help people like you and me, who could get small business loans or jobs repairing roads, who could send our kids to good public schools and maybe even pay less to private health insurance companies. In other words, government actually doing what it takes to spend money and fix the economy would cut into the power and profits of big business.

If at this point you are arguing with me in your head, please note that you are literally siding with Wall Street fraud artists and against the interest of not only yourself and your neighbors but your children and your grandchildren for generations to come.

Those who are trying to convince us that our government is broke and cannot afford to borrow more are, consciously or unwittingly, reinforcing the vastly unequal society that we have become, where the size of the silver spoon in your mouth when you’re born matters infinitely more than how hard you work.

Yes, our level of national debt is in the long-term untenable. And yes, the fact that large swaths of that debt is owned by China and Saudi Arabia is deeply problematic. The solution, however, is to use government spending on innovation and new industries not only to kick start a private sector that has been reluctant to create jobs but also retool the American economy so we actually make things again and have a broad middle class with good wages and benefits who can afford to buy the stuff we make, creating the kind of demand we need for long-term sustainability. But Wall Street and big business lobbyists don’t want you to own your own business, make a good salary and have a nice house with a reasonable mortgage. How would they make money on that?

After enough times running scared, maybe soon we'll figure out big business is really just crying wolf.

The USA does not have a spending problem -

2011-04-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

it has a great big screaming REVENUE problem.
Why do I say this? I say this because my wife and I, (with our low 6-figure income)paid MORE in taxes in 2010 than GE with it's $5.1B in profits (US-based); not only did they pay SWABO in taxes, they got $4B in tax subsidies. Guess who pays for that?
As Chuck Collins puts it:

"Our communities are enduring mammoth state and federal budget cuts because we have, in large part, failed to sufficiently tax America's millionaires and billionaires or prevent aggressive tax avoidance by multinational companies. The rest of us are paying to pick up the slack. (emphasis added)
Congress has blown holes in our tax code, losing hundreds of billions in revenue. Worse, lawmakers have averted their eyes as corporate lobbyists drill new tax loopholes and extract new corporate welfare subsidies."

This is a society that has its priorities seriously bent, as proven by proposals before Congress to cut services for children and the mentally ill while leaving these tax loopholes in place.

Collins proposes $400B/year in new revenues that would impact just under 2% of the nation:

:"There are four revenue raisers that Congress could institute tomorrow that would generate $400 billion a year--or $4 trillion over the next decade. Such programs would restore greater fairness to our tax system and reduce the extreme levels of inequality polarizing our society.

Congress could levy a modest financial transaction tax on the transfers of stock, currency, and speculative investments that do little to strengthen the real economy. This would generate $150 billion a year while exempting smaller investors.

Lawmakers could reduce corporate tax dodging by closing overseas tax havens and requiring companies to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they actually earn in this country. This could generate as much as $100 billion a year.

Congress could establish new top tax rates on households with annual incomes over $1 million, which could generate another $100 billion a year. Under our current tax system, a person earning $374,000 a year pays the same top tax rate as someone earning $10 million a year.

Lawmakers could institute a progressive estate tax on fortunes over $5 million, with higher rates on billionaire estates. That would generate $45 billion a year."

Harry Truman - a man of foresight...

2011-04-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

He said this in 1948:
"Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke.
They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing.
They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights.
They favor minimum wage--the 'minimumer' the better.
They endorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools.
They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them.
They consider electrical power a great blessing--but only when the private power companies get their rake-off.
They think American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people.
And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it."
Amazing how it's still 100% truth.

How the Tea Party is killing the GOP

2011-03-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

This from a REPUBLICAN named Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy:,

Republicans in Congress have reached a crossroads – they must decide if they are a governing party or one so beholden to its ideological fringe that it is incapable of doing the basic work of a legislative body. How the party answers that question will determine not only the direction of policy on key issues and Republican prospects for reelection next year, but who will be president in 2013.

It is obvious that the Tea Party phenomenon has rocked Republican politics; pushing an already conservative party much further to the right and bringing into it a vast number of new members who are highly energized and deeply ideological, but very inexperienced at politics and not very knowledgeable about how Congress operates on a day-to-day basis. This has proven deeply frustrating to many veteran Republican legislators.

I have long sought a good explanation for where the Tea Party came from and the source of its intensity. Toward this end, I have been reading newly-elected Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) book, “The Tea Party Goes to Washington.” He is, of course, a Tea Party favorite; son of another Tea Party favorite, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX); and someone who got elected by opposing the GOP establishment in Kentucky, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

According to Sen. Paul, much of what drives the Tea Party is sort of a delayed reaction to the disappointing presidency of George W. Bush. In a revealing passage from his book, Paul says:

“Imagine this – what if there had never been a President George W. Bush, and when Bill Clinton left office he was immediately replaced with Barack Obama. Now imagine Obama had governed from 2000 to 2008 exactly as Bush did – doubling the size of government, doubling the debt, expanding federal entitlements and education, starting the Iraq war – the whole works. To make matters worse, imagine that for a portion of that time, the Democrats actually controlled all three branches of government. Would Republicans have given Obama and his party a free pass in carrying out the exact same agenda as Bush? It’s hard to imagine this being the case, given the grief Bill Clinton got from Republicans.”

This argument hits close to home for me because after 30 years of working in Republican politics, including for Ronald Reagan and Rand’s father, I became deeply alienated from the party for the very reasons Rand explains. The final straw for me was the way Republicans rammed the Medicare Part D program into law in 2003. This took place at the very moment when the Medicare program was starting to seriously hemorrhage money. It was grossly irresponsible to add massively to its deficit largely for the purpose of buying re-election for Bush and his party in 2004.

This year, Medicare Part D will add about $55 billion to the deficit – far more than can be saved with all the budget cuts Republicans can possibly hope to achieve in fiscal 2011. Furthermore, it annoys me to see so many of those who voted for Medicare Part D, such as House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), treated as if they are paragons of fiscal responsibility. In fact, their concern for excessive spending is highly selective, directed almost entirely at programs supported by Democrats primarily to undercut their political support, not because they care so much about deficits.

My disgust with the GOP became so intense after the Medicare Part D debacle, I wrote a bookon the subject. I thought if conservatives broke with Bush at that time and adopted a more Tea Party-like approach to getting our fiscal house in order that it might stave off the political disasters I saw looming in 2006 and 2008.

Republicans preferred to kill the messenger, leading to my permanent estrangement from both the party and the conservative movement. But perhaps my effort wasn’t entirely for naught. Apparently, one of the few readers of my book was Rand Paul, who quotes me saying this:

“The point is that George W. Bush has never demonstrated any interest in shrinking the size of government. And on many occasions, he has increased government significantly. Yet if there is anything that defines conservatism in America, it is hostility to government expansion. The idea of big government conservatism, a term often used to describe Bush’s philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.”

So why is it that I have been disdainful of the Tea Party from its first manifestation in early 2009? The main reason is that so many of its members simply don’t know what they are talking about; they seem to think that strong opinions are a substitute for facts, research and analysis. Consequently, many Tea Party members hold views on various topics that are, frankly, nuts, and these views have been embraced by some Republican voters as well.

For example, a March 15, 2011, poll by Public Policy Polling found that 25 percent of Republicans expect that a group called ACORN is going to steal the election for Obama next year and 31 percent aren’t sure; only 43 percent of Republicans believe this is false. In point of fact, ACORN no longer even exists, and it’s doubtful that it could have stolen a local election for dog catcher even if it wanted to.

An August 27, 2010, poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates International found that 52 percent of Republicans believe that Obama sympathizes with Islamic fundamentalists and favors imposing Islamic law around the world; only 7 percent thought this was definitely untrue.

A March 24, 2010, Harris poll found that 67 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is a socialist, 61 percent think he wants to take away the right to own guns, 57 percent believe he is a Muslim, 45 percent say he was not born in the U.S. and has no right to be president, and 41 percent think he is just looking for an excuse to seize dictatorial power.

As a consequence, even solid conservatives like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) are considered dangerous liberals. And slightly less conservative Republicans such as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman are treated as dangerous radicals. In a March 14 New York Times report, Utah Tea Party leader Jacqueline Smith said of Huntsman, “On a good day, he’s a socialist. On a bad day, he’s a communist.”

This sort of rhetoric serves no useful purpose and is at best distracting. It also elevates minor differences on policy or strategy among Republicans into deep disagreements over principle. This has made it impossible for Congress to finish work on the 2011 budget, which should have been done last summer. Hard line Tea Party members keep insisting on impossibly large budget cuts despite the fact that the vast bulk of the budget is effectively off limits.

Not surprisingly, a March 16 Pew poll found that Republicans are losing ground rapidly. Backing for their approach to the budget has fallen even with Republicans and Tea Party members. Support among the former has fallen from 69 percent last November to 52 percent now; among the latter it has fallen from 76 percent to 52 percent. Support among independents is down from 37 percent to 17 percent.

For these reasons, I think Republicans are blowing it. They are rapidly using up their limited political capital for getting control of the budget on trivial spending cuts, such as defunding National Public Radio, that will have no long-term impact. Furthermore, we know from experience that the public’s support for budget cuts quickly ran out in 1981, leading inevitably to tax increases. And according to a February 16 Harris poll, there is less support for spending cuts today than there was back then.

Although Republicans today are confident that they will retake the Senate and the White House next year, I think their current strategy of pandering to Tea Party extremists is undermining these hopes. Polls show Democrats up for reelection next year, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, to be rapidly improving their chances. And Republicans should remember that one reason they controlled the White House during most of the postwar era is that the American people don’t really trust either party to control the entire government. Moreover, the lousy job Republicans did when they controlled Congress and the White House from 2001 to 2006 is still a recent memory.

It’s possible that the Tea Party will turn out to be a force for good, but increasingly it looks like populist movements of the past that quickly burned out without having a lasting impact on policy. The more quickly the movement matures, learns patience, and becomes sophisticated about the nature of politics, the better its chances of achieving its goals.

Martha Stewart went to jail for this...

2011-02-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

...but how much you wanna bet Clarence Thomas WON'T?

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8331

"Evidence is mounting that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas violated federal law by failing to report his wife's annual salary of more than $120,000 per year from conservative political organizations by checking "NONE" on the box for "Non-Investment Income" for his wife Virginia on judicial Financial Disclosure Reports for the last 20 years."

Under Title 18 of US Code, Section 1001, it is a crime to:

1. knowingly and willfully;
2. make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation;
3. in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of the United States.

This is what Martha Stewart was jailed for. Lying to the Feds is a felony, and carries with it a possible fine, as well as 5-8 years in the slammer.

So now, we see whether or not the Supreme Court Justices are subject to the law. Equal treatment under the law, or special treatment under the law - what's it gonna be, Mr. Holder?

The economy is SO bad...

2011-01-26T17:35:00.000-08:00

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

Wives are having sex with their husbands because they can no longer afford batteries.

CEO's are now playing miniature golf.
...
Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

I saw a Mormon with only one wife.

I bought a toaster oven and my free gift was a bank.

Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America .

Motel Six won't leave the light on anymore.

A picture is now only worth 200 words.

They renamed Wall Street 'Wal-Mart Street.'

When Bill and Hillary travel together, they now have to share a room.

And, finally...I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline. I got a call center in Pakistan,and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited,and asked if I could drive a truck...

(BIG thanks to my Facebook friend Kevin Colter for this!)

Republicans, taxes, and you...

2011-01-25T20:18:00.000-08:00

So, here's what Rep. Paul Ryan (the guy who delivered the pack of falsehood known as "the Republican Response to the State of the Union") wants to do to reduce the deficit:

Basically, everybody sacrifices except the top 10% of income earners - the other 90% of us pay for their tax cuts.
So, people who make LESS pay MORE, and those who make MORE pay LESS. The total opposite of Adam Smith. And Republicans have the gall to call LIBERALS "socialist" and accuse them of "class warfare" when they've been practicing BOTH since 1980.
And after 30 years of Republicans mostly running things, we wonder WHY the economy's in the crapper?

A cake fit for a Geek...

2011-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

Would you believe this is a CAKE?

Apparently, a company in Cambridge, Ontario called Kandy Cakes makes this, as well as other cake art. Inasmuch as I was a HUGE fan of "Battlestar Galactica", my inner geek just died of happiness a little...now, if they do the Enterprise...

So, here's what we get...

2010-11-07T09:31:00.001-08:00

I remember, so I'm NOT voting Republican.

2010-11-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

This needs to be seen by LOTS of people...

Here's where the current edition of Conservatism will take you...

2010-10-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

A shout-out to "Xithras" at Democratic Underground for this.

Why are some of us unsympathetic to these types? Because we live with them every day. We see them flaunt their destructive ways, we watch as they protest and scream for the shutdown of our "socialist" school systems, the revocation of environmental laws, and the unraveling of the social contracts upon which our society is built. These people are anti-tax, anti-government, and anti-society. If they had their way, ALL fire departments would adopt a "fee for use" system. So yes, I unapologetically admit to a bit of schadenfreude when one of them sees their house burn to the ground, as their libertarian fantasies rear up and bite them in the ass.

I've seen it, I've lived it, and I'm all out of sympathy.

I live just outside of the smallish unincorporated city of Salida California, a dirty little burg of about 18,000 people just north of Modesto California. It's the heart of California's conservative wonderland, the California Central Valley. This is an area where even the Democrats run to the right of each other in an attempt to pick up votes.

Salida, a city of 18,000 people, has no municipal fire department. It's fire services are provided by the surrounding county. It has no city government. It's government services are provided by the surrounding county. It has no police department. It is patrolled by a single sheriff's deputy, provided by the county. The town also has no high schools, and foists its kids off on nearby Modesto to finish their educations (to their credit, Modesto just opened a brand new $100 million dollar high school in Salida, to provide the educational opportunities that its residents won't). Why doesn't a city of 18,000 people provide these fundamental services on their own? To answer that, I'm going to provide a simple example.

Salida has street lights. To run those street lights, the people of Salida formed the Salida Lighting District many decades ago. While they were happy to form the district, they refused to pay for it. The town, which only had about 1500 people at the time, didn't have the resources to fund it, so the county stepped in and covered that too.

In 2001 the Salida Lighting District ran into a serious problem. Escalating electrical costs, combined with aging and deteriorating equipment in many areas, were driving operational costs through the roof. Rapid growth had also caused the town to explode and transform from a tiny farm town into a full blown city. It's appeal? "No city taxes here!" was an actual selling point used on some neighborhoods when they were going up!

Unfortunately for Salida, the economy was also in the tank in 2001, and the county was broke. So it came up with a plan. A simple assessment to fund the district and keep the street lights on. The assessment, in total, would have added about ONE DOLLAR a month to the average persons property taxes. $15 a year, per home, is all they needed to keep the lights on. The residents were OUTRAGED. They held protests along the main street, blanketed the community with flyers and campaign posters slamming the proposal, and saturated the local airwaves with their talking points about how the government was "oppressing" them through taxation, which they see as a form of slavery ("They can take your land and property if you don't pay! You are not free if you have to PAY the government for the right to be left alone! Taxes = Socialism!").

Would you like to guess how the people of Salida finally voted? You guessed it. Those streets were DARK. And you should have HEARD the residents whine when their crime rates shot up, when their cars started vanishing from their driveways, and when vandalism went through the roof. Of course, they couldn't blame themselves for the new crime. Nooo...they blamed the "lazy" sheriffs department for not patrolling more, and "soft on crime liberals" for not locking away criminals for longer terms. No matter how bad things got, it was ALWAYS the "liberals" fault.

Today the lights are back on, funded by the county. I pay to power the lights to protect their homes, even though they have consistently refused to do so.

So, yes, I'm not particularly sympathetic when I hear about someone getting bit by their own greed. Does that make me a bad liberal? Maybe, but it also makes me human.

Supporting these libertarian freeloaders, in my book, is like enabling a junkie. You may make their lives easier and more pleasant, but your enabling behavior is simply feeding their addiction. Like all addicts, they need to hit bottom and admit that their lifestyle has to change before they're going to be willing to do so. While our natural liberal inclination is to step in and help them, I genuinely believe that we're just making the problem worse when we do so. Libertarians and tea baggers are junkies, addicted to an idea and supporting a social model that is fundamentally unsustainable in a modern society. Yes, it's tragic that this guy lost his house because he wouldn't pay for fire protection, or that the people of Salida lost their cars and had their houses vandalized because they wouldn't pay for street lights, but we solve NOTHING by swooping in like superheroes to save the day. To them, we're still the enemy, and their addiction continues unabated.

Should I Sell mine for nothing?

2010-10-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

Massive props to my mother's cousin Delores, who sent this in an e-mail:
NOTE: the reference to www.politifact.com is something I added in.

I have something valuable that I do not wish to sell. I have not listed it on Craig’s List nor put an ad in the paper. Yet every day I am bombarded by those who wish to buy it. Even foreign corporations are using the Chamber of Commerce as a go-between to purchase what I have. Some of the buyers introduce themselves but most do not. Why they want to remain anonymous I do not know. I feel no shame in possessing this asset yet there must be some shame associated with BUYING one.

As you may have guessed, it is my vote that everyone wants to buy. The funny thing is that if I were willing to sell it I would not receive anything for it. Where all this money goes I do not know but I do know that the seller doesn’t receive anything.

Perhaps you also have been approached in this way. If you simply accept the buyers’ word for how your vote should be cast then you are both lazy and a fool. Do foreign corporations REALLY want what is best for YOU? Do anonymous strangers? Why would they?

You can find out the truth about what they say by simply going to places such as FactCheck.org, or poltifact.com. You can check on someone’s voting record at VoteSmart.org. Or you can simply sell your vote and then complain about the results of having done so.

Thank God for giving us brains. Pray that everyone uses theirs to know what they are voting for - what is true and what is not.

Wow...

2010-06-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

My friend, Che' Vyfhuis does a spiritual blog called "Namaste Wholistic", and she just did the NICEST writeup on - me:
http://namastewholistic.blogspot.com/2010/05/beautiful-people-profile-damon_31.html

SO nice to be appreciated like that...

An example of what's happened to the GOP...

2010-05-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

...and why it's driving itself off a cliff at full throttle. You would think, from previous postings in this space,that I would rejoice in this. Instead, I lament it. A viable opposition party is absolutely necessary for the health of any kind of democracy, and the Republicans are taking themselves out of the game.

Read the whole article in Newsweek:

In the year and a half since Barack Obama was elected president, Republicans nationwide seem to have given up on the whole governing thing and chosen instead to play a long, rancorous game of "I'm More Conservative Than You Are." They've been playing it in Utah, where incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett—lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 84—lost a primary battle this past weekend. They've been playing it in Florida, where moderate Gov. Charlie Crist was forced last week to abandon his bid for the Republican Senate nomination and run as an independent instead. And they've even been playing it on the national stage, where the RNC recently toyed with the idea of imposing a purity test on potential GOP candidates. Comply with eight of the party's 10 "Reaganite" principles, the thinking went, and you're worthy of funding. Fall short, and you might as well be Leon Trotsky.

Conservatives would claim that the Republican Party can only regain power by "returning to its roots" and banishing heretics. But a funny thing happened on the way to winning national elections again: the GOP has drifted so far right that it's retroactively disqualified the only Republicans since 1960 who've actually managed to, you know, win national elections. Based on their public statements, policy proposals, and accomplishments while in office, none of the modern Republican presidents—not Richard Nixon, not Gerald Ford, not George H.W. Bush, not even Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush—would come close to satisfying the Republican base if they were seeking election today.

The point is not that these guys were liberals. It's that the GOP is at risk of becoming so dogmatic that it would exclude even its most iconic members. Preemptively ruling out the sort of pragmatic policies that have worked in the past is a novel strategy, and it clearly plays to the passions of the moment. But unless the demographic evidence is wildly inaccurate and the country is, in fact, growing more and more right wing over time, it's probably not a strategy that's going to work particularly well in the future.

2012 - the end of the world?!?!?

2010-04-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

NO.
Not even close - Hollywood's best special effects notwithstanding.

Here's some of what NASA has to say on the subject:

"Much like Y2K

(Boy, how true THAT turned out to be - NOT! -Me)

, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline. Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.

Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar."

So, yet another big, scary apocalypse story bites the dust. Sorry, scaremongers.

Betcha THIS doesn't show up in the mainstream media...

2010-04-28T08:18:00.000-07:00

...Not enough gloom & doom.

"Banks' repayments of TARP preferred stock and warrants continue to turn a profit for the U.S. Treasury Department, according to analysis by SNL Financial.

As of March 30, the government has made an 8.5% annualized return on the 49 companies that have exited the Capital Purchase Program and the Target Investment Program, which was created to provide additional funding to Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. SNL defines "exiting" the programs as completely redeeming the preferred stock and repurchasing the warrants. Institutions that had their warrants auctioned by the Treasury are also considered to have exited the programs, as are institutions that declared bankruptcy.

The proceeds from both TARP warrant repurchases and auctions have largely fueled the profitability of the programs. The redemptions of the preferred shares alone generally only provide the government a 5% return, which comes from the dividends. American Express Co.'s and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s warrant repurchases in July 2009 helped create some of the largest annualized company returns at 23.3% and 20.0%, respectively. According to Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Goldman Sachs' warrant represented one of the best deals for the American taxpayer, as reported by Bloomberg News on July 22, 2009. Wilson said that based on his calculations, Goldman Sachs paid 98% of the value of the warrants.

Overall, 64 institutions have fully redeemed their preferred stock issued under TARP. Of those, 39 have repurchased warrants, while seven have had their warrants auctioned by the Treasury. In sum, institutions that have exited the programs, plus those 18 that have fully redeemed their TARP preferred stock but still have their warrants held by the Treasury, returned 7.6%, as of March 30."

Full story here.

Wonder if this is going to help Goldman Sachs get themselves out of the fire they built for themselves...

Could I have a show of hands AGAINST finance reform?

2010-04-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

This from the Huffington Post:

Goldman Sachs put its own interests ahead of its clients in trying to profit off the souring housing market of 2007, documents released Monday show.

The firm, which had profited handsomely off packaging and selling securitized subprime home mortgages to investors during the housing boom, switched directions in early 2007, furiously shedding its home mortgage-linked risk and buying as much insurance as it could, effectively shorting the market throughout the year -- a move that netted the firm "billions and billions" at the expense of its clients, according to the documents released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

"Goldman Sachs made billions of dollars from betting against the housing market, and it placed those bets in some cases at the same time it was selling mortgage-related securities to its clients," said the committee's chairman, Carl Levin (D-Mich.). "They have a lot to answer for."

Goldman says it always puts its clients' interest first. It's a position the firm has stuck by as Levin's investigation has produced emails and internal documents apparently showing otherwise.

Despite the fact that 67% of the American public favors action to reform the financial markets, Republicans in the Senate voted UNANIMOUSLY yesterday to prevent such a bill even being discussed on the floor of the Senate. Ironically, these same senators, who were VERY loud in proclaiming (about healthcare reform) how "we should not go against the will of the American People", have now voted against a 67% majority...is there any more doubt that the GOP is aligned with corporate interests, AGAINST the American Public?

It's worth pointing out that, prior to FDR and the New Deal, we had unregulated financial markets, and a "panic" every 20-30 years: 1797; 1819;1837(followed by a 5-year depression); 1857 (full effect didn't let up until the Civil War) 1873 (followed by a 6 -year depression);1893 (3-year depression); 1907, and 1929(perhaps you've heard of that one...).
Then came Franklin Roosevelt, and common-sense market reforms. There was not a major financial crisis in the USA from 1934 until the 1980's, when, under Reagan, moves were made to deregulate the financial industry. Then in the mid-late '80s, we had the S&L crisis/scandal, and in 2008 - well, you know.

Hmmm...crisis every 20-30 years (deregulated), or steady growth with no panic (regulated)? Seems the GOP likes the former...

6 myths about poverty in America:

2010-04-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

(ON EDIT: forgot to give this proper attribution - This was written by Charlotte Hill, and can be found in full at Change.org)

With partisan bickering and punditry around every corner, it's easy for insignificant details like facts to get lost in the commotion. But have no fear — statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are here!

The OECD is the invitation-only country club of international organizations; only 30 countries are members, and they're the cream of the crop: the Old Europeans (Italy, Germany), the Nordics (Norway, Sweden), the Wealthy Westerns (United States, Canada) and the Rich Asians (Korea, Japan), with a few wild cards thrown in for fun.

For economists, policymakers, researchers and the like, the OECD is a goldmine of reliable information. It constantly collects data on every aspect of its member countries, developing comprehensive "factbooks" for public review. Using data from the 2009 Factbook, let's examine some of the common myths perpetuated about poverty in America.

#1: The United States has one of the lowest poverty rates in the industrialized world.
Nope, sorry. At about 17 percent, the U.S. actually has the third-highest poverty rate of all the OECD countries, coming in only slightly ahead of Turkey and Mexico. Denmark boasts the lowest poverty rate, an inspiring five percent.

#2: Income inequality isn't a big problem in America.
Incorrect. Unfortunately, the U.S. still has above-average income inequality, joining the likes of Poland, Portugal, and, once again, Mexico and Turkey. Is this any surprise? After all, in 2006, CEOs of large U.S. companies made more money in a day than average American workers made throughout the year.

#3: Due to our exquisite health system, Americans live longer than residents of other countries.
Wrong, once again. The average life span of an American is below the OECD average, right above the Czech Republic. Of course, rich Americans can still expect to live to ripe old ages; an average wealthy white woman, for example, will enjoy 81.1 years of life. The average life expectancy for her poor, black, male counterpart, on the other hand, is only 66.9 years.

#4: Okay, well, due to our exquisite health system, the U.S. has a lower infant mortality rate than other countries.
No. In fact, out of all the OECD countries, we rank third to last in terms of infant mortality. But at least we get to hang out with our good friends, Mexico and Turkey, who once again join us at the losers' table.

#5: At least Americans don't have to spend as much money on health care as people from other countries ... right?
The truth is quite the opposite. Americans spend substantially more on their health than people from any other OECD country. Over 15 percent of the national GDP is spent on health care; Switzerland, the closest contender for most money spent on health care, only comes in at 11 percent.

#6: The U.S. spends more money on helping the poor than any other industrialized nation.
This is perhaps the biggest myth of all. At about 16 percent, the United States ranks fourth to last in public social expenditures as a percentage of GDP, beating only Turkey, Mexico and Korea. On the other end of the spectrum, Sweden spends about 29 percent of its GDP on public social expenditures.

"Two Santa Clauses" by Thom Hartmann

2010-04-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

Thom Hartmann is the author of "SCREWED: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class".

Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years
by Thom Hartmann

This weekend, House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Odds are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

When Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most Republicans felt doomed (among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski). Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people's bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover's economic worldview.

In Hoover's world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys – the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves – who ruled Wall Street and international finance.

Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

Thus, the Republican mantra was: "Lower taxes, reduce the size of government, and balance the budget."

The only problem with this ideology from the Hooverite perspective was that the Democrats always seemed like the bestowers of gifts, while the Republicans were seen by the American people as the stingy Scrooges, bent on making the lives of working people harder all the while making richer the very richest. This, Republican strategists since 1930 knew, was no way to win elections.

Which was why the most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91 percent. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:

"[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon 'moderation' in government.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt
[you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Goldwater, however, rejected the "liberalism" of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and other "moderates" within his own party. Extremism in defense of liberty was no vice, he famously told the 1964 nominating convention, and moderation was no virtue. And it doomed him and his party.

And so after Goldwater's defeat, the Republicans were again lost in the wilderness just as after Hoover's disastrous presidency. Even four years later when Richard Nixon beat LBJ in 1968, Nixon wasn't willing to embrace the economic conservatism of Goldwater and the economic true believers in the Republican Party. And Jerry Ford wasn't, in their opinions, much better. If Nixon and Ford believed in economic conservatism, they were afraid to practice it for fear of dooming their party to another forty years in the electoral wilderness.

By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their "big government" projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn't seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.

Everybody understood at the time that economies are driven by demand. People with good jobs have money in their pockets, and want to use it to buy things. The job of the business community is to either determine or drive that demand to their particular goods, and when they're successful at meeting the demand then factories get built, more people become employed to make more products, and those newly-employed people have a paycheck that further increases demand.

Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.

At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!

Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories or import large quantities of cheap stuff from low-labor countries, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow. George Herbert Walker Bush – like most Republicans of the time – was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting "Voodoo Economics," said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer's tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we'd ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.

But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell supply-side economics. In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next thirty years.

Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

When Reagan rolled out Supply Side Economics in the early 80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding (mostly military) spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession – the worst since the Great Depression – and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath. But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on – they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security – and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by increasing the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.

Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that's just how it turned out. Bill Clinton, who had run on an FDR-like platform of a "new covenant" with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national health care system, found himself in a box. A few weeks before his inauguration, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government. Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an "end to welfare as we know it" and, in his second inaugural address, an "end to the era of big government." He was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton by 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: "We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts..."

Ed Crane, president of the Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year: "When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you don't cut spending. That's why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments."

George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts – particularly a cut to a maximum 15 percent income tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive in the mail – and blowing out federal spending. Bush even out-spent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible.

And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

"...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... [T]he capital-gains tax has come erratically but inexorably down -- while the market capitalization of U.S. equities has risen from roughly a third of global market cap to close to half. These many trillions in new entrepreneurial wealth are a true warrant of the worth of his impact. Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize."

In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years – they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people.

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.

And now Boehner, McCain, Brooks, and the whole crowd are again clamoring to be recognized as the ones who will out-Santa Claus the Democrats. You'd think after all the damage they've done that David Gregory would have simply laughed Boehner off the program – much as the American people did to the Republicans in the last election – although Gregory is far too much a gentleman for that. Instead, he merely looked incredulous; it was enough.

The Two Santa Claus theory isn't dead, as we can see from today's Republican rhetoric. Hopefully, though, reality will continue to sink in with the American people and the massive fraud perpetrated by Wanniski, Reagan, Laffer, Graham, Bush(s), and all their "conservative" enablers will be seen for what it was and is. And the Obama administration can get about the business of repairing the damage and recovering the stolen assets of these cheap hustlers.

"The Closing of the Conservative Mind" -Bruce Bartlett

2010-03-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

It seems the conservative movement is eating its own now.
As a follow-up to Mr. Frum's writing below:

As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.

Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute. I don't know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already.

Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

I will have more to say on this topic later. But I wanted to say that this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.

"Waterloo" by David Frum

2010-03-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

David Frum is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and he wrote this 3 days ago:
Since writing this, Mr. Frum has been fired from his post at the American Enterprise Institute.

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

"Deem and Pass" is UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!

2010-03-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

To put it politely - horse puckey.

This is just another one of those things, like reconciliation, obstructionism, the filibuster, federal spending, marital infidelity, etc. that are only bad when Democrats do them.

Republicans don't want to admit that they want NO reform of health care at all, so they make it about whatever distraction they can. Today it's "deem and pass", which Republicans used 202 times while they controlled the House from 1995-2007, but is, suddenly, "unconstitutional". Guess the Republicans use the "IOOKIYAR" rule
(It's Only OK If You're A Republican)for such things.

How do I know Republicans want no reform? Very simple. What did THEY do about it when they had control of Congress for 12 years? Two things: "Diddly" and "Squat".

I've suspected this for years...

2010-03-04T22:54:00.000-08:00

...and now it stands confirmed.
The RNC (Republican National Committee) doesn't even respect its own donors!

The way they're running from this - note they're not denying it - tells me all I need to know about this leak's veracity.

I wold LOVE to be able to play this well...

2010-03-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

From one of the best movies you've probably never seen: "August Rush". I resisted it myself for awhile, and kicked myself for that when I finally watched it.

Even better about this scene: These two have NO clue they're actually father & son.

Wow. Just...Wow.

2010-02-18T17:22:00.000-08:00

I think this guy can play a little bit...

Another reason Jon Stewart is a national treasure...

2010-02-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Apparent Trap

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Not only are Republicans wrong, but they're also cowardly. GOD FORBID there should be an open discussion where somebody questions their talking points..."Then people might actually see how stupid we are..." Like when they go to Hawaii and try to explain to Hawaiians how the Government-run healthcare they've had for 40 years doesn't work.

The OTHER plot to wreck America...

2010-01-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

...And Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qeada have nothing to do with it...Hopefully this panel generates some headlines, because we are OWED an explanation.

By Frank Rich in Yesterday's New York Times:
(original article here.)

THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

The window for change is rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.

It’s against this backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless bloviation.

He wants to examine the financial sector’s “greed, stupidity, hubris and outright corruption” — from traders on the ground to the board room. “It’s important that we deliver new information,” he said. “We can’t just rehash what we’ve known to date.” He understands that if he fails to make news or to tell the story in a way that is comprehensible and compelling enough to arouse Americans to demand action, Wall Street and Washington will both keep moving on, unchallenged and unchastened.

Angelides gets it. But he has a tough act to follow: Ferdinand Pecora, the legendary prosecutor who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the 1929 crash as F.D.R. took office. Pecora was a master of detail and drama. He riveted America even without the aid of television. His investigation led to indictments, jail sentences and, ultimately, key New Deal reforms — the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the formation of banks too big to fail.

As it happened, a major Pecora target was the chief executive of National City Bank, the institution that would grow up to be Citigroup. Among other transgressions, National City had repackaged bad Latin American debt as new securities that it then sold to easily suckered investors during the frenzied 1920s boom. Once disaster struck, the bank’s executives helped themselves to millions of dollars in interest-free loans. Yet their own employees had to keep ponying up salary deductions for decimated National City stock purchased at a heady precrash price.

Trade bad Latin American debt for bad mortgage debt, and you have a partial portrait of Citigroup at the height of the housing bubble. The reckless Citi executives of our day may not have given themselves interest-free loans, but they often walked away with the short-term, illusionary profits while their employees were left with shredded jobs and 401(k)’s. Among those Citi executives was Robert Rubin, who, as the Clinton Treasury secretary, helped repeal the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall after years of Wall Street assault. Somewhere Pecora is turning in his grave

Rubin has never apologized, let alone been held accountable. But he’s hardly alone. Even after all the country has gone through, the titans who fueled the bubble are heedless. In last Sunday’s Times, Sandy Weill, the former chief executive who built Citigroup (and recruited Rubin to its ranks), gave a remarkable interview to Katrina Brooker blaming his own hand-picked successor, Charles Prince, for his bank’s implosion. Weill said he preferred to be remembered for his philanthropy. Good luck with that.

Among his causes is Carnegie Hall, where he is chairman of the board. To see how far American capitalism has fallen, contrast Weill with the giant who built Carnegie Hall. Not only is Andrew Carnegie remembered for far more epic and generous philanthropy than Weill’s — some 1,600 public libraries, just for starters — but also for creating a steel empire that actually helped build America’s industrial infrastructure in the late 19th century. At Citi, Weill built little more than a bloated gambling casino. As Paul Volcker, the regrettably powerless chairman of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said recently, there is not “one shred of neutral evidence” that any financial innovation of the past 20 years has led to economic growth. Citi, that “innovative” banking supermarket, destroyed far more wealth than Weill can or will ever give away.

Even now — despite its near-death experience, despite the departures of Weill, Prince and Rubin — Citi remains as imperious as it was before 9/15. Its current chairman, Richard Parsons, was one of three executives (along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and John Mack of Morgan Stanley) who failed to show up at the mid-December White House meeting where President Obama implored bankers to increase lending. (The trio blamed fog for forcing them to participate by speakerphone, but the weather hadn’t grounded their peers or Amtrak.) Last week, ABC World News was also stiffed by Citi, which refused to answer questions about its latest round of outrageous credit card rate increases and instead e-mailed a statement blaming its customers for “not paying back their loans.” This from a bank that still owes taxpayers $25 billion of its $45 billion handout!

If Citi, among the most egregious of Wall Street reprobates, feels it can get away with business as usual, it’s because it fears no retribution. And it got more good news last week. Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the Banking Committee may fall next year to Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.

Though bad history shows every sign of repeating itself on Wall Street, it will take a near-miracle for Angelides to repeat Pecora’s triumph. Our zoo of financial skullduggery is far more complex, with many more moving pieces, than that of the 1920s. The new inquiry does have subpoena power, but its entire budget, a mere $8 million, doesn’t even match the lobbying expenditures for just three banks (Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America) in the first nine months of 2009. The firms under scrutiny can pay for as many lawyers as they need to stall between now and Dec. 15, deadline day for the commission’s report.

More daunting still is the inquiry’s duty to reach into high places in the public sector as well as the private. The mystery of exactly what happened as TARP fell into place in the fateful fall of 2008 thickens by the day — especially the behind-closed-door machinations surrounding the government rescue of A.I.G. and its counterparties. Last week, a Republican congressman, Darrell Issa of California, released e-mail showing that officials at the New York Fed, then led by Timothy Geithner, pressured A.I.G. to delay disclosing to the S.E.C. and the public the details on the billions of bailout dollars it was funneling to its trading partners. In this backdoor rescue, taxpayers unknowingly awarded banks like Goldman 100 cents on the dollar for their bets on mortgage-backed securities.

Why was our money used to make these high-flying gamblers whole while ordinary Americans received no such beneficence? Nothing less than complete transparency will connect the dots. Among the big-name witnesses that the Angelides commission has called for next week is Goldman’s Blankfein. Geithner, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke should be next.

If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.

From Steve Benen of "Washington Monthly"

2010-01-07T23:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_01/021802.php
STIMULUS FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS....
The American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think tank, which enjoyed very close ties to the Bush White House, and which is not exactly known for its support for the Democratic domestic agenda.

So it was interesting to see the AEI's economic outlook for 2010 and its analysis of the Obama administration's recovery package from last year. (via Jon Chait)

The real economy ... responded to the massive stimulus but remained heavily dependent on it. In the United States, growth during the second half of 2009 probably averaged about 3 percent. Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009. [emphasis added]

I realize that Republicans and their most strident allies are entirely convinced that the stimulus didn't work. I've also seen the polls that suggest Americans in general are skeptical about its efficacy.

But among economists, we seem awfully close to complete unanimity that the Democrats' recovery effort rescued the economy from collapse, created jobs, and generated economic growth that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Among those who know what they're talking about, this isn't even worth debating anymore -- it's simply an obvious truth.

Which is why the politics of the economic debate can be so exasperating. To reiterate a point from a month ago, the Republicans' track record of uninterrupted failure is rather astounding.

The GOP said the stimulus package would fail to create jobs. We now know the Republicans were wrong.

The GOP said the recovery efforts would fail to generate economic growth. We now know the Republicans were wrong.

The GOP said the stimulus "failed." We now know the Republicans were wrong.

The GOP said the government should cancel unspent recovery funds. We now know the Republicans were wrong.
The GOP said tax cuts are more effective at stimulating the economy than government spending. We now know the Republicans were wrong.

Had Republicans been in the majority a year ago, the results for the United States and the global economy likely would have been devastating. That GOP officials and their allies continue to pretend otherwise serves as a reminder of just how little role reality can play in our discourse.

I've always found this useful in political discussions...

2010-01-05T10:32:00.001-08:00

...as somebody ALWAYS brings up Hitler and/or the Nazis at some point...

A classic bit...

2010-01-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

The Frantics' "Last Will and Testament - Boot to the Head" animated by Phoenix Wright. As Larry the Cable Guy is fond of saying, "I don't care who y'are - that's funny, right there."

Happy 2010!

2010-01-01T22:57:00.000-08:00

...but not for Colin...

And then, in the morning - what a difference a night's sleep makes...

"Government can't do anything better than the Private Sector"

2009-11-01T23:22:00.000-08:00

I hear this a hundred times a day, despite the fact that those who say this STILL have not managed to demonstrate to me when their semi-sacred Private Sector ever won a war, put men on the Moon, or built a highway system...
Well, here's ANOTHER fact for them to ignore -
Obama auto plan stopped global auto collapse from Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The global auto industry would have collapsed if the U.S. government had not provided taxpayer-backed financing for automakers General Motors and Chrysler, according to the chief executive officer of Motors Liquidation Co (MTLQQ.PK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

"If GM had gone down, the world's supply base would have gone down," said Al Koch, speaking at the Reuters Restructuring Summit in New York. Koch was GM's chief restructuring officer during the bankruptcy and now heads the GM unit that is being liquidated.

"There wouldn't have been a manufacturer that could have completed a car, because somewhere on the car there would be a part that needs to come from a supplier that had failed," he said.

"I'm not so sure that even Lexus (7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) wouldn't have suffered," said Koch. "I think that every single manufacturer would have gone down, and the cascading unemployment from that would have been catastrophic."

Earlier this year, the U.S. government helped finance bankruptcies for GM and Chrysler CCMLPD.UL with $60 billion in taxpayer money. The funding helped support operations while the automakers slashed debt and other obligations while in Chapter 11 protection from creditors.

The companies emerged from bankruptcy through a sale process that transferred their best assets to new operating companies funded by the U.S. government while leaving liabilities, excess equipment and some shuttered industrial sites in companies set up as liquidators.

"I do believe that if President Obama hadn't done what he did for GM and Chrysler, that the world's auto industry would have collapsed and I believe we would have been in the middle of a worldwide depression," Koch said.

(Reporting by Chelsea Emery; Editing by Gary Hill)

A pity for Conservatives that reality has such a strong liberal bias...

So let me get this straight...

2009-10-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

Christians are feeling PERSECUTED? We're 70% of the freaking US population, and we're PERSECUTED? Gimme a frickin' break!
And all this comes from the recent hate crimes legislation passed by Congress. It has spawned a new wave of irrationality from the religious right, fearing it's an assault on freedom of religion.

My views on this were well summed up by Nance Greggs on Democratic Underground:

A rightwing acquaintance recently sent an email with a link to the following, “Christians on high alert over hate crimes passage”, adding the query “Is this one more nail in the coffin of Christianity?”

Well, the answer is yes and no, depending on what kind of “Christian” one is these days.

The first line of the linked article – “A hate crimes bill sent to President Obama for his signature raised a red flag for Christians” – sadly, and oh-so-ironically, speaks for itself.

For those of us raised as Christians back in the day, it would seem that enacting laws that prosecute and punish the propagation of hate towards one’s fellow citizens, hopefully reducing same in consideration of the consequences thereof, would be right in keeping with Christian values and the promotion of increased civility and understanding among us.

But that was, as I’ve said, back in the day – before the new, improved, narrow-minded, homo-hating, sword-wielding, the-end-justifies-the-means Jesus hit the shelves, currently being marketed at a pulpit in your area (action accessories, e.g. “Jesus hates Faggots” placards, home addresses of abortion providers, etc., sold separately).

“On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a hate crimes bill that Christian leaders have warned for years could greatly infringe on the rights of those who speak to loudly about their religious views. Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel agrees with most observers that President Obama will sign the measure -- adding that the president desires to "throw a bone to homosexual activists because they have been breathing down his neck...and this is a way to hold them off."

Ah, yes – the “homosexual activists”, those nasty immoral people who Jesus railed against continually. One need only look to the New Testament to read quote after quote by the Prince of Peace himself to know that – oh, that’s right. He was completely silent on the topic. I guess he had more important things on his mind. There’s also the fact that Jesus’ dad left any mention of “thou shalt not” out of the Ten Big Ones when it came to homosexuality – and bein’ God and all, one would imagine he could have gone with Eleven Commandments if he’d been of a mind to. (Hey, it’s not like He couldn’t foresee a problem, if He thought one existed).

As for the statement that Mr. Barber “agrees with most observers” – who are said “observers”, and what are their names? Inquiring minds really DO want to know these days.

“Barber views the legislation as something akin to a muzzle. ‘Unfortunately, it places Christians – people of faith, people who have traditional values relative to sexual immorality – in an untenable position,’ says the attorney.

Yes, the position IS untenable – if you’re taking the position that spewing hate is part and parcel of Christianity, and shouldn’t be “muzzled”. That would appear to be, on its face, as untenable as it gets.

If modern-day followers of the New Improved Jesus see anti-hate-crime legislation as being somehow anti-Christian, one has to ask exactly what it is they are seeking to “protect” as their God-given right (pun definitely intended) to say, do and promote as part of “free speech” or “freedom of religion”.

It would seem that speaking to “traditional Christian values” would include the oldies-but-goodies – like being thy brother’s keeper, tending to the sick and homeless in His name, treating the least among us as we ourselves would hope to be treated – and wouldn’t be subject to, by any stretch of the imagination, being “muzzled” by government fiat.

But this, of course, is the underlying problem. The current crop of hypocrites behind the New Improved Jesus movement know that what they seek to be exempt from prosecution for is becoming more and more blatantly a matter of hatred disguised as moral rectitude; what is being sought to be “protected” is not the right to speak freely, but the right to hide behind religion while spewing intolerance against those who refuse to conform to the New Fangled Christianity being espoused by those who want to hold on to their prejudices and still be recognized as part of the flock.

“Barber explains that Liberty Counsel intends to challenge the constitutionality of the hate crimes legislation.”

Well, you do that, Mr. Barber. I wouldn’t want to think you and your ilk are wasting time challenging the constitutionality of torture, or the involvement the past administration in war crimes, or the moral reprehensibility of withholding medical care from those who can’t afford it – things that the Old Time Jesus would, no doubt, have had something to say about were he still here.

Apparently Mr. Barber thinks that the lefties, the progressives, the Democrats, are too wacky to know the difference between the freedom to publicly acknowledge one’s religious beliefs and hate speech – which is pretty rich considering the out-and-out wackiness of the “religious right” we, as a nation, have had to endure for far too long.

I have no doubt that if the speech and/or actions Mr. Barber fears will fall squarely under the grounds of a hate crime under the new legislation included loving one's neighbor as one's self, he'd have a legitimate argument. But it doesn't, and he doesn't, and there you have it, plain and simple.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for spewing hatred and intolerance in the Lord’s name – for they shall inherit the Earth.”

I don’t actually recall that as being one of the Beatitudes – but it’s a whole new world under the New Improved Jesus.

I just wish the Old Jesus was still in vogue. He was someone worth meeting, getting to know - too bad Mr. Barber never had the pleasure.

Oh my LORD, no...

2009-10-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

This is a slideshow on HuffingtonPost for the most inappropriate Halloween costumes. Some of the adult costumes put me in mind of something an Air Force buddy once told me:
"The things you see when you don't have a gun..."

A new, unexpected player in the healthcare battle:

2009-10-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

Consumers Union, publisher of the popular magazine "Consumer Reports", has jumped into the battle for health care reform with an ad BACKING Obama's plan.

Said President Jim Guest: "You may wonder why we are injecting ourselves so publicly into a heated debate that has generated an enormous amount of concern and confusion... We are in the business of providing information and advice that helps consumers. We don't make campaign contributions. We don't endorse candidates. And we don't care who gets the credit for fixing the problems with health care -- we just need them fixed. Doing nothing about health care is not a solution."

(video at link)

The next Billy Joel...?

2009-09-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

My 7-YO son Colin at his recital this past Saturday night. ALL the kids studying under this music teacher performed - some were quite good! After Colin got done "freelancing" (which had me tearing out what's left of my hair), he got down to business:
I have NO idea where this "hamminess" of his comes from... ;-D Check out the FULL "performance" on YouTube... (link when my wife gets to uploading it...)

On edit: My wife WUSSED! she, too, cut out the free-lance portion...but it's here.

On FURTHER edit(9/25/09): She un-wussed. You can see the free-lance portion here.

The evidence against ACORN is overwhelming...

2009-09-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

This is from my friend "Grantcart" at Democratic Underground:

Its a little long but the evidence against ACORN requires it.

First let us establish the point of context.

What is fraud in the context of the federal government?

Well sitting in CA 49 we consider ourselves something of experts on fraud. When we find somebody that is really good on the subject we send them to Congress.

First we sent Duke Cunningham to represent us but Duke being somewhat stupid didn't set up a finance committee and pay his wife $ 250,000 a year to run his shakedown, he met government contractors in restaurants and actually wrote down how much his commission would be for each contract he could get. Then he kept the notes.

Second we then sent Brian Bilbray. He became Mayor of Imperial Beach. He has never lived in this district but being the aficionados of fraud that we are we sent him to Congress anyway.

Now fraud, criminal enterprise and personal debauchery have not been isolated in CA 49 it has spread evenly throughout the US, we just have a predilection of not beating around the bush when it comes to our Congressman. We put it up there for everyone to see.

Before we get to the evidence against ACORN we have to say that we see that serious crimes have become common even among our clergy, corporations and communities. Now we didn't send cameras into all of those Catholic and Evangelical Churches to get them to do pedophilia or sleep with prostitutes, these are crimes that became so endemic that they became virtual class action lawsuits.

We have Governors hiring prostitutes and using state money for overseas affairs, Senators having sex in public bathrooms and well we don't have time to continue with all of their crimes. Now we didn't have cameraman punk all of these people, their misbehavior became concrete because well it became public.

Now when it comes to working with the federal government it is critical that sub contractors work to a higher standard than that of our Congressman and Senators (who are all involved in legal bribery), our clergy, our community leaders. They should also work to a higher standard than the government itself. Every branch of the government has had corruption in the form of embezzlement or other abuse. The CIA, FBI, each branch of the service, and so on.

We are currently involved in a great debate about what to do about Health Care. This is an industry that is basically involved in a criminal enterprise to sign contracts and then find frivolous means to back out of claims. The first step of the reform process should have started with empaneling a grand jury.

But when you are a sub contractor working for the federal government you must work to a higher standard than all of these.

Take for existence the record of General Electric in working as a sub contractor for the United States Government

A Brief List of criminal, civil, political and ethical transgressions

1949 General Electric deliberately released radioactive material to see how far downwind it would travel.

1986 the United States and General Electric had conducted experiments on hundreds of United States citizens. One of GE’s most gruesome experiments — disclosed in the Markey hearings — was performed on inmates at a prison in Walla Walla, Washington, near Hanford. Starting in 1963, 64 prisoners had their scrotums and testes irradiated to determine the effects of radiation on human reproductive organs.

GE is wholly or partially liable for at least 78 federal Superfund sites.

+ On September 29, 1998, General Electric agreed to a $200 million settlement in principle of environmental claims resulting from pollution of the Housatonic River and other areas by chemical releases from GE’s plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The claims result from a long history of GE’s use and disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other hazardous substances at the plant, which GE no longer uses for manufacturing.

+ On March 26, 1998, General Electric agreed to pay a $92,000 fine for previous violations of environmental reporting requirements for toxic releases at its silicone manufacturing plant in Waterford, New York,

+ On September 15, 1995, General Electric agreed to pay $137,000 in fines and expenses and to clean up a hazardous waste dump at a former plant where it repaired and rebuilt transformers.

+ October 1993, investigators swooped down on the GE Apparatus Service Center in Brandon, Florida with search warrants to take soil samples and confiscate computer records and files. Inspectors found 30 violations,
GE closed the facility in December 1993.

+ On March 13, 1992, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a $20,000 fine against General Electric for violations of regulations at the fuel fabrication plant in Wilmington, North Carolina.

+On May 29, 1991, GE personnel accidentally moved about 320 pounds of uranium to a waste treatment tank. The danger of the mistake was that the size and shape of the waste container caused unsafe concentrations of uranium, which could have led to a nuclear accident. The NRC dispatched a special incident investigation team the same day and an inspection began two days later. The NRC found that the mistake was the result of lax safety controls.

+At an April 22, 1998 shareholder meeting, GE CEO Jack Welch claimed: “PCBs do not pose adverse health risks.” Testifying in Albany on July 9, 1998, EPA Administrator Carol Browner stated: “GE tells us this contamination is not a problem. GE would have people of the Hudson River believe, and I quote: ‘living in a PCB-laden area is not dangerous.’ But the science tells us the opposite is true ... And concern about PCBs goes beyond cancer ... The science has spoken: PCBs are a serious threat...”

Defense Contracting Fraud

+ On July 23, 1992, GE pled guilty in federal court to civil and criminal charges of defrauding the Pentagon and agreed to pay $69 million to the U.S. government in fines — one of the largest defense contracting fines ever.
General Electric said in a statement that it took responsibility for the actions of a former marketing employee who, along with an Israeli Air Force General, diverted Pentagon funds to their own bank accounts and to fund Israeli military programs not authorized by the United States.Under the settlement with the Justice Department over violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, GE paid $59.5 million in civil fraud claims and $9.5 million in criminal fines.

+ GE is a repeat offender when it comes to Defense Department fraud. The company has repeatedly violated the False Claims Act — a measure originally proposed by Lincoln to protect federal coffers. When the Project on Government Oversight surveyed defense contractors, it found that General Electric was responsible for 15 instances of fraudulent activity in just a four year period (1990-1994) — more than any other defense contractor. GE:

1. Paid $7.1 million to settle a qui tam suit alleging that the company failed to satisfy electrical bonding requirements for its jet engine contracts, thereby creating a safety risk.
2. Paid $5.87 million (along with Martin Marietta) to settle a qui tam suit associated with improper sales of radar systems to Egypt.
3. Paid fines between 1990 and 1994 ranging from a $20,000 criminal fine to a $24.6 million civil fine for a variety of defense contracting frauds, including: misrepresentation, money laundering, defective pricing (2 incidents), cost mischarging (3 incidents), false claims, product substitution, conspiracy/conversion of classified documents, procurement fraud and mail fraud.
4. Was convicted on February 3, 1990 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia of defrauding the government out of $10 million for a battlefield computer system.
5. Pled guilty on May 19, 1985 to charges of fraud and falsifying 108 claims on a missile contract.
6. Was convicted of defrauding the Air Force out of $800,000 on the Minuteman Missile Project.
7. Was convicted of bribing the Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority.
artial rebates to buy new GE dishwashers.

Recidivistic GE
What distinguishes General Electric is not merely the number of crimes committed — or the dollar amount of the crimes — but a consistent pattern of violating criminal and civil laws over many years.

Exacerbating the situation, General Electric has been a leader in using political influence to attempt to overturn the environmental and defense contracting laws that it persistently violates.

excerpts taken from http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01july-august/julyaug01corp4.html.

Now, despite this record of continual fraud by General Electric no one has ever called for the Federal Government to stop contracting with General Electric.

Again these are crimes that became evident. No one went into General Electric with a camera and tried to see what crimes a local manager might do.

And now we come to the case of ACORN.

The evidence is overwhelming.

Now it is clear that when it comes to the question of voter fraud all of the charges against them have proven baseless. Irregularities with either silly or fictional voter registration is marked by ACORN and submitted to voter registrars as required by law.

Surprisingly, despite all of the efforts by FOX to undermine the election with baseless charges of election fraud, not a single case of voter fraud has been substantiated.

So now FOX has cooperated with provacateurs to go into dozens of ACORN offices and see if they can't get people to take some stupid bait and get involved in improper actions.

And now the call goes out to "defund ACORN". Every organization in or out of the government has had some malfeasance. Even the Church is filled with it.

And yet only ACORN is expected not simply to identify wrong doers and implement corrective systems; they are to be wiped out of existence.

Now what is the evidence against ACORN? What is the essential element that makes them unique that they must be exterminated. Are they more corrupt than General Electric?

No. The evidence of ACORN is that they are there to help poor people. They are there to advance social justice.

Listen to 30 seconds of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGFXzPNtH3g

The Fox Host asks the undercover reporter "You're not a pimp; you're just playing one on our show, and you played it on those tapes"

Reporter's response "I AM ONE OF THE WHITEST GUYS EVER"

ACORN's crime is that they work with the poor and minorities and so because of that "crime" they will be treated differently than every other contractor who has ever done business with the government and had some of its employees act improperly.

Poor people aren't stupid, or more inclined to impropriety, or more filled with hatred.

Poor people are simply poor. And shame on this country that it has no moral ambition to face its poor, embrace them and find ways to end their poverty. We would rather send rich kids in to see if we can't find some to be ridiculous and then hold up the people who work with the poor to public ridicule.

Where are their defenders?

This from a Retired General

2009-09-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

...in today's Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:

By BUD KENNEDY

bud@star-telegram.com

A retired Air National Guard general called Thursday with three worries.

"Something bad’s gone wrong in this country," said retired Brig. Gen. Tom Daniels, 62, of Fort Worth.

"Something’s wrong in Arlington. Something’s wrong in Austin. And something’s wrong in America."

He flew missions in Vietnam. In the Pentagon, he served proudly under President George H.W. Bush — "whom I loved," he added.

"Now our country chooses a black man as president — and suddenly, the governor is talking about secession? And Arlington is boycotting the president? They won’t even let children see him in school?"

Eight years removed from 9-11, Daniels feels a chill.

"Look how united we were!" he said in his booming command voice. "Now — look how we’ve squandered it!"

He didn’t even have to mention U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson:

"We’re hollering at each other now," Daniels said. "We hate each other."

And he sees that as dividing our heroes in uniform.

"I talk to military guys all over the world — white, black, brown," he said. "They’re asking, 'If it was unpatriotic to talk this way about the last president, isn’t this unpatriotic?’ They’re concerned. This is nothing but open, unabated racism. Nobody’s saying that."

I know what some of you are going to say. It’s political, not racial.

But I also can’t imagine people acting this way over, say, a President Harry Reid or even President Al Gore.

"All I know is, the black guy wins, and suddenly these nuts are out there on TV and radio preaching to long-haul truck drivers all over the country," Daniels said.

"Somebody needs to start talking back. Where are the moderates in the Republican Party? Where are the people like George [H.W.] Bush who made sense? They’re letting the nuts lead them around by the nose."

He is particularly steamed that Arlington schools still refuse to replay Obama’s address to schoolchildren yet will bus fifth-graders to hear George W. Bush on Sept. 21 at a Super Bowl event at Cowboys Stadium. "I’ve always called Arlington a true all-American city," he said. "I love the parks. I love how they stuck their neck out to get baseball and football."

He lives near the Arlington border and shops in the city.

"But now they’re one of the few cities in America boycotting the president’s speech? That’s wrong."

Daniels reserved special vitriol for Gov. Rick Perry.

"He’s Air Force. He should be ashamed," Daniels said. "I’m ashamed of him." Perry "should know better" than to float talk about Texas leaving the U.S., Daniels said.

"Even for a campaign, it’s the wrong thing to talk about," he said. "That’s not our Texas. We love our country. We’re not going anywhere. We don’t believe in secession."

He had one final question.

"When is somebody in Arlington or Austin going to stand up to these people?"

It’s his mission.

Joe Wilson (R-SC) - our shouter at the health care speech last night...

2009-09-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Joe Wilson's Dirty Health-Care Secret
Newsweek

By Adam Weinstein

Poor Joe Wilson. The conservative Republican representative from South Carolina stepped in it Wednesday night when he broke with centuries of decorum by screaming, "You lie!" at President Obama during his health-care speech to a joint session of Congress.

Cut the man some slack. He's passionate! I know this because he told me, in the sole message that blazes across his campaign Web site: JOE WILSON IS PASSIONATE ABOUT STOPPING GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTH CARE!

Except that he's not─at least not when it comes to his, and his family's, government-run health care. As a retired Army National Guard colonel, Wilson gets a lot of benefits (one of which, apparently, was not a full appreciation of the customs, traditions, and courtesies that mandate respect for one's commander in chief). And with four sons in the armed services, the entire Wilson brood has enjoyed multiple generations of free military medical coverage, known as TRICARE.

Yes, it's true. As politicos and town-hall criers debate the finer points of the public option, employer mandates, coverage for undocumented immigrants, and who's more Hitler-like, they seem to miss a larger point: the United States has single-payer health care. It covers 9.5 million active-duty servicemen and women, military retirees, and their dependents─including almost a 10th of all Californians and Floridians, and nearly a quarter of a million residents of Wilson's home state.

Military beneficiaries like Wilson who, as a retiree, is eligible for lifetime coverage─never have to worry about an eye exam, a CT scan, a prolonged labor, or an open-heart surgery. They have access not only to the military's 133,500 uniformed health professionals, but cooperating private doctors as well─whose fees are paid by the Department of Defense. It's high-quality care, too: surveys from 2007 and 2008 list TRICARE among "the best health insurer(s) in the nation" by customer satisfaction. Yet Wilson insists government-run health care is a problem.

To be fair, Wilson has been consistent in his policymaking if not his personal life: according to his last congressional opponent, Wilson voted 11 times against health care for veterans in eight years, even as he voted "aye" for the Iraq War (during the debate on the war vote, he even called one Democrat "viscerally anti-American"─several times). He voted to cut veterans' benefits─not his own─to make room for President George W. Bush's tax cuts. He repeatedly voted for budgets that slashed funding to the Veterans Administration and TRICARE. And perhaps most bizarrely, he refused─repeatedly─to approve Democratic-led initiatives that would have extended TRICARE coverage to all reservists and National Guard members, even though a disproportionate number of them have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan─and many lost access to their civilian work benefits when they did so.

There's one other notable exception to Wilson's tough-on-government record: In July, when the health-insurance debate just started heating up, he offered an amendment that would exempt TRICARE from any system of employer mandates in a health-care bill. It's not clear whether this is necessary, since most such bills in Congress keep government benefits exempt from the rules as a matter of course. But Wilson took the opportunity to make his stand.

"As a 31-year Army Guard and Reserve veteran, I know the importance of TRICARE," he said in a press release. "The number of individuals who choose to enroll in TRICARE continues to rise because TRICARE is a low cost, comprehensive health plan that is portable and available in some form world-wide." He went on to call TRICARE "world class health care," concluding on a personal note. "I am grateful to have four sons now serving in the military, and I know that their families appreciate the availability of TRICARE," he said.

What does that mean? Nothing except that Joe Wilson was against government-run health care before he was for it. And now he's against it again. Just not when it comes to his own flesh and blood.

Well, I like THIS...

2009-09-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

You can see it, and the comments it's generated, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGC1mCS4OVo

So, the banks are getting our money at 0%, and then turning around and charging us 30%?!? WTF?

"Republicans Get Rolled...And Deservedly So"

2009-09-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is from Conservative talker/blogger Neal Boortz:

Today at noon Barack Obama addresses the nation’s schoolchildren .. or a good number of them anyway. Many students won’t hear the speech because of a rather severe miscalculation from the right. Republican screaming and wailing made it sound as if Hugo Chavez was flying in via Aeroflot to speak to our poor, innocent, unsuspecting angels. School districts reacted … and millions of school kids will sit around picking their noses at noon instead of watching the speech.

So now the speech is out. As of yesterday afternoon you could read it on the Internet. I’ve read it, and if there is anything in there that I wouldn’t want my child to have heard from a U.S. President, I certainly couldn’t find it.

Egad! The speech is innocuous! What are we going to do now? I know! We’ll all claim that Obama changed the speech after the uproar from the right! Well, duhhhhhh. Of course he did! Why wouldn’t he! Well, actually he really didn’t have to change it. It probably wasn’t written by the time conservative boxers bunched up en masse. So Obama’s speechwriters took their cue from the right and made the speech essentially bulletproof from the get-go. One sharp mind in a Republican strategy session could have seen this one coming from the next galaxy.

President says he will give speech to schoolchildren.

Republicans say the speech will be full of leftist propaganda

Parents run in circles flailing arms overhead while screaming and shouting.

Some school officials black out Obama’s speech. (racist comment)

Grinning speechwriters prepare speech with no leftist propaganda.

Republicans look like fools.

People now more reluctant to listen to conservative complaints about Obama.

Now how easy was that? For about three days we have parents, the Republican Party and assorted odds spinning around on their eyebrows and spitting wooden nickels over Obama’s speech. He’s going to indoctrinate our children. He’s going to fill them full of socialist ideology. They’re all going to come away from school today singing Kumbaya and waving red flags. They’ll probably stop on the way home from school to buy a Che Guevara t-shirt from vendors the Democrats will have waiting out in front of their schools. Then the hopelessly indoctrinated kids will come home and destroy all the incandescent light bulbs and turn the spare bathtub into a recycling bin. Before they do their homework (reading The Communist Manifesto) they’ll hide the car keys so daddy has to take mass transportation to work on Wednesday.

TeamObama must have loved this one. Talk about a hanging curveball. Once the manic inanity started all they had to do is sit back, prepare an innocuous speech for The One, and let the people scratch their heads wondering what in the hell the Republicans were so upset about! Now the next time the right comes up with an objection to some Obama concept, people who last week might have been on board will stand back and look at the Republicans with a jaundiced eye.

This one was so easy for the left I can’t even think of another 300 words to fill out this column. So just move on to the next one. Two steps forward and three steps back. Unless PrezBO really messes up his address to Congress tonight watch for his popularity ratings to rise. Thanks, Republicans! See if there’s some drug available for that rectal-cranial inversion you’re suffering from.

This pretty well sums it up for me...

2009-09-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

From today's Ft. Worth (TX) Star-Telegram:

Reaction to Obama’s school speech is tragic, sinister and sickening
By BOB RAY SANDERS

Parents are talking about keeping their kids home from school this week.

Some so-called leaders are expressing grave concern "for the children" in fear of an impending disaster.

And the provocateurs who commandeer broadcast microphones on a daily basis continue to warn of a serious contagion that the nation must fight "by any means necessary."

I could understand it if these folk were worried about the H1N1 ("swine flu") virus, but that’s not their concern.

The infection they are afraid of is the president of the United States and his possible influence on America’s children.

In an age when schools are wired with the latest technology, and a young, confident president knows how to use it, the White House thought it a good idea for Barack Obama to address the nation’s youth. His Tuesday speech can be viewed live in the classroom or recorded and used later.

Many parents have balked at that idea and have put pressure on school administrators not to show the speech or use its proposed accompanying lesson plans. Area districts are handling the matter in different ways: some leaving it up to individual teachers, some taping it to be used on request by students or instructors and at least one that will make it available for parents’ use to decide if their youngsters should view it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a president has tried to inspire young people to think, to talk and to act. John Kennedy did it, as did Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Who can be a more persuasive role model for students to stay in school or commit to serving their country than the person who holds the highest office in the land?

Unfortunately for a growing number of frightened, misguided and hate-filled Americans, this president should not and must not be a role model for their children. Therefore, their young sons and daughters should not be in class — or perhaps even in school — if there’s a remote possibility that the plague-spreading left-wing devil called Obama will speak to them.

They’ve labeled him the Antichrist who is set on desecrating the Constitution, destroying the country and annihilating their children’s futures.

It is theater of the absurd, being played out in exaggerated dramatic fashion on stages large and small — in offices, backrooms, broadcast studios and on the World Wide Web.

I would find it laughable if it were not so tragic, so sinister and so sickening.

People who consider themselves intelligent, patriotic and religious have bought into this pathetic self-serving campaign to oppose Obama at every turn by plotting against any initiative he offers and continuously praying for his failure even if it would mean the downfall of their own country.

While I understand mean-spirited, partisan adults exhibiting such behavior, I can’t comprehend why anyone would want to pass along such disrespectful and vitriolic traits to their children.

In an opinion column submitted to various media last week, a former Reagan administration official found it ridiculous that the lesson plan submitted for use by teachers with the Obama speech suggested discussing things like, "Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of Congress or the governor? Why is what they say important?"

Peggy Venable, now Texas director for a group called Americans for Prosperity, said, "That’s enough to send chills down my spine. Schoolchildren should not be indoctrinated in obedience to and service in support of the president of the United States."

The former White House liaison for the U.S. Department of Education went on to object to an earlier plan that students be encouraged to write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.

"It appears to be nothing short of training our children to support Obama policies," she said. "When the recruits are children, doesn’t that constitute indoctrination, even brainwashing?"

Such critics give teachers and students, including their own, very little credit for being able to think and intelligently debate the issues of the day.

Students throughout the nation have been writing the White House for months in efforts to express their concerns to Obama. Hundreds of thousands of them already are engaged in communication with the president. That is a very healthy and encouraging sign — and a great educational experience.

It is too bad that those caught up in what they regard as a socialist conspiracy to destroy our democratic society are infecting their children with the disease of intolerance.

And believe me, just like the swine flu, intolerance is contagious.

Oh, give me a BREAK...

2009-09-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

So now, the right is up in arms over Obama giving an address to schoolkids?!?
OK, Rant ON:

Can they get ANY stupider?
This is nothing more than over-the-top, pathetic hysteria. These people DESPERATELY need to reintroduce themselves to reality. They had no trouble with GWB reading to schoolkids, as he was doing on 9/11, Nor with Bush 41 speaking to schoolkids in
1991, but now that a DEMOCRAT is President - hoo boy! INDOCTRINATION! SOCIALISM! Apparently, according to these brain-dead fools, talking to schoolkids is BAD - unless a Republican does it. Give me a flippin' break!

GET. A. GRIP.

If you are one of those comparing Obama to Hitler - You are an IDIOT.
If you think Obama is socialist or marxist - get a dictionary, because you obviously have NO CLUE what the words you're using mean - AND you're an IDIOT.

Why in hell don't they just come out and say what they REALLY think - that they can't stand the idea that a Black man got elected President, and that all this socialist/marxist/radical Muslim/indoctrination BS is nothing more than "Mommy! Mommy! Make the scary Black man go AWAY!"
Effing IDIOTS.
Rant OFF.

A new medication

2009-09-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

for those of us who LIKE Obama's health care plan...

One Republican's view on health care reform...

2009-08-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

This poor guy's gonna get run out of the party on a rail - he makes FAR too much sense.
From last Saturday's Augusta (GA) Ledger-Enquirer:

Beware health-industrial complex

By Jack Bernard
Ledger-Enquirer
August 23, 2009

I am a Republican, former chairman of the Republican Party in Jasper County, Ga., and chair of that county commission.

In my view, it is unpatriotic to continue to lie to the American public about the situation facing us. Over the last 10 years, wages have gone up by about one-fourth. Health insurance premiums have gone up well over 100 percent. We cannot continue along this path to fiscal destruction. Inaction is not an option.

It is also against American values to mislead the public into believing that everyone can get good care even if they do not have insurance. The mark of a great nation is not how well it treats its privileged, but rather how well it treats its downtrodden. On this measure, we fail miserably; strange for a nation that prides itself on being the most religious democracy in the world. Where in the Bible did Jesus say “might makes right” or “those with the gold rule”?

Very few health or insurance professionals advocate for a single-payer system, the best way to control costs and ensure access. I hear all sorts of reasons: rationing (really, like HMOs do not do that now), paperwork (apparently insurance company bureaucracy does not count), socialism (come on — practitioners will still be independent and we all know it) and so forth. It is rare that we hear the underlying cause openly stated: greed. It will cut my income.

The members of Physicians for a National Health Plan are an exception to this rule. If you take a look at their Web site, www.pnhp.org, the rationale for a single-payer system is clearly articulated.

The French have the top system in the world, with something like Medicare covering 66 percent of costs and private insurance for the rest, yet their cost per capita is half of ours. Universal Medicare will both control costs and achieve universal access to high quality care. Congressmen would get the same insurance as you and I. You better believe your coverage would be just as good as or better than what you are getting now.

The problem is not technical; it is political. It is high time we put the country ahead of ourselves and establish a single-payer system.

Jack Bernard is CEO of Monticello (Ga.) Health Care Solutions and a former chairman of the Jasper County Commission and the Jasper County Republican Party.

Anybody ELSE wanna say the bank bailouts were wasted money?

2009-08-31T05:51:00.000-07:00

How much you wanna bet that the mainstream media totally ignores this?

LONDON (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve has made $14 billion in profits on loans made in the last two years, The Financial Times reported on Monday, citing officials close to the matter.

The U.S. central bank also earned about $19 billion from interest and fees charged to institutions that tapped liquidity facilities during the global financial crisis, the report said.

If the Fed had invested the same amounted loaned out in three-month Treasury bills since August 2007, it would have earned $5 billion in interest, the FT said.

This estimate excludes company bailouts and purchases of long-term assets as well as unrealized gains or losses on the Fed's portfolio of mortgage-backed securities and Treasuries purchased as part of the $1.75 trillion asset purchase program.

The Fed was not immediately available for comment on the report.

A brief, documented history...

2009-08-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Of Right-wing ignorance:

What I want to know...

2009-08-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

is, what is the REPUBLICAN healthcare plan? For weeks and months, all I've heard is their criticism of the Democratic plans. "They are socialistic." "They cost too much." "They are going to pull the plug on Grandma", and so on. Now, I want to hear what their plan is to fix healthcare in this country.

What do they say about universal coverage? Do they think every American should be able to afford going to a doctor if they get sick?

What do they say about portability? If you lose or leave your job, do they believe you should be able to take your coverage with you to your next job?

What about costs? Are they satisfied with 10% increases or more every year in health insurance costs? How do they plan to bring it down other than by "tort reform"? Those lawyers support Democrats, don't you know?

What about pre-existing conditions? Do they have a plan where someone with a pre-existing condition cannot be denied coverage by insurance companies? Also, do they have a plan where they are not priced out of the market?

What about a public option? How do they plan on creating competition? Do they think letting insurance companies compete across state lines will open up competition? Are they willing to open insurance companies up to trust and monopoly violations? Are they willing to put regulations on big insurance companies?

I want to hear the media challenge them just the way they have challenged the Democrats. I'm going to enjoy that - especially since the GOP had 8 YEARS to come up with a plan, and did NOTHING.

With all the cries of "Socialism" going about...

2009-08-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd compose a handy guide for Conservatives:

So, you say you don't like socialism? You don't want the government running anything? Wellll....

Don't EVER say you honor and support our military. The military (even including private, outsourced companies like Blackwater) are all paid and supplied by the Federal government.

Don't EVER call 911 for a medical, fire or police emergency. Emergency services are largely provided for by public servants using government-provided equipment and training.

Don't EVER drive on a federal or state or local highway. You can only drive on roads built and maintained by private companies. You'll really have to do this as you will not have a driver's license which is a product of a government agency.

Don't EVER buy any food that passed an FDA inspection. You have to grow your own fruits and vegetables and raise your own cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. Same goes for any medications.

Don't EVER visit a National, State, or Local park and especially don't participate in any activities there (fishing, hunting, camping, hiking, etc. that would require further expenditures for licenses.)

Don't EVER be in a position you would need a public defender. They are paid for via public dollars.

Don't EVER expect or ask for the prosecution against someone who did you harm, directly or indirectly. The judicial system, you see, is a government-run agency paid for by our tax dollars and other fees.

Don't EVER visit a public library and use the resources there as tax dollars bought those books, PCs, etc.

Don't EVER put your children in public schools (elementary, high school, or college). The elementary and high schools are free via tax dollars. Teachers are paid via tax dollars.

Don't EVER apply for Medicaid if you become disabled or indigent and need assistance such as food stamps, medical care, utility bill assistance or job training. After all, you don't want other Americans who have no insurance to have it paid for via tax dollars, why should you get to take part in that system?

Don't EVER accept Medicare after you retire and no longer have any type of private health insurance.

Don't EVER accept any Social Security payment after you no longer work or a spouse has died. Live off of your private investments or the charity of friends and family.

Don't EVER apply for a small business loan from any government agency. Where do you think that money would come from anyway?

Don't EVER ask the government for help in getting child support payments from a deadbeat spouse.

Don't EVER apply for Unemployment if you should happen to lose your job.

Don't EVER mail a letter via the USPS and contact every single entity that would otherwise use the USPS for mailing you items to have them sent via UPS, FEDEX, or electronic delivery.

Don't EVER visit a museum that was built or is maintained or operated by any government agency.

Got that?

Now HERE'S some talent...

2009-08-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

Something non-political, for once! :-)
This is Ryan's friend Michael playing Beethoven's "Fur Elise". Bear in mind - Michael is 9 years old.

If you're getting this by e-mail, come to the blog to see the video - this kid's something else!

What happens if Health Care Reform fails...

2009-08-18T15:48:00.001-07:00

as Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, et. al. seem to want? Here's Uwe Reinhardt's take on it.

So who is Uwe Reinhardt, and why should you care what he says about this?
Uwe Reinhardt is James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by Congress to advise it on issues related to the payment of physicians.

Uwe Reinhardt says health costs are rising at unsustainable pace, gobbling up middle-class incomes.

(CNN) -- Watching the angry outbursts at town hall meetings on health reform and the continuing public ambivalence about current efforts to reform our health system almost makes me wish that the reform effort fails.

Perhaps Americans need to be taught a basic lesson on the economics of employment-based health insurance before they will feel as smugly secure with it as they do now and before they will stop nitpicking health-reform efforts to death over this or that detail.

And America's currently insured middle class will be increasingly desperate if health reform fails. Millions more such families will see their take-home pay shrink. Millions will lose their employment-based insurance, especially in medium and small-sized firms. And millions will find themselves inexorably priced out of health care as we know it.

Milliman Inc., an employee benefits consulting firm, publishes annually its Milliman Medical Index on the total health spending by or for a typical American family of four with private health insurance. The index totals the family's out-of-pocket spending for health care plus the contribution employers and employees make to that family's job-related health insurance coverage.

The Milliman Medical Index stood at $8,414 in 2001. It had risen to $16,700 by 2009. It is likely to rise to $18,000 by next year. That is more than a doubling of costs in the span of a decade!

Since 2005, the index has grown at an average annual compound rate of 8.4 percent. Suppose we make it 8 percent for the coming decade. Then today's $16,700 will have grown to slightly over $36,000 by 2019.

Economists are convinced that this $36,000 would come virtually all out of the financial hides of employees, even if the employer pretended to be paying, say, 80 percent of the employment-based health insurance premiums. In the succinct words of the late United Automobile Worker Union leader Douglas Fraser:

"Before you start weeping for the auto companies and all they pay for medical insurance, let me tell you how the system works. All company bargainers worth their salt keep their eye on the total labor unit cost, and when they pay an admittedly horrendous amount for health care, that's money that can't be spent for higher [cash] wages or higher pensions or other fringe benefits. So we directly, the union and its members, feel the costs of the health care system." ("A National Health Policy Debate," Dartmouth Medical School Alumni Magazine, Summer 1989: 30)

Unfortunately, very few rank-and-file workers appreciate this fact. Aside from their still modest out-of-pocket payments and contributions to employment-based insurance premiums, most employees seem sincerely to believe that the bulk of their family's health care is basically paid for by "the company," which is why so few members of the middle class have ever been much interested in controlling health spending in this country.

The price for that indifference will be high. If efforts at better cost containment fail once again, and health care costs rise to $36,000 on average for a typical American family of four under age 65 -- as almost surely it would -- that $36,000 will be borne entirely by the family. That family's disposable income would be much higher if the growth of future health spending was better controlled. And, as noted, many smaller firms will stop altogether providing job-based health insurance.

It would be a major problem for families with an income of less than $100,000 a year. In 2007, only about 25 percent of American families had a money income of $100,000 or more. Close to 60 percent had family incomes of less than $75,000.

Here it must be remembered that the wages and salaries of the solid American middle class have been relatively stagnant in recent years and are likely to remain so for the next decade. Unemployment is not likely to fall significantly soon, regardless of what stock prices do on Wall Street. Indeed, often stock prices rise as firms lay off workers to drive up profits through leaner payrolls.

This prospect -- relatively stagnant family incomes combined with family health-care costs that double every decade -- is what America's middle class should contemplate as it thinks about the imperative of health reform. (emphasis by the blog poster)

It is a pity that this central issue seems to have been shoved aside by mendacious distortions from Sarah Palin, Betsy McCaughey, Rush Limbaugh and other extremist commentators seeking to frighten Americans with their prattle about "death panels" and "pulling plugs on granny" that no bill before Congress even remotely envisions.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Uwe Reinhardt. (except for the fact that I agree with them 100% because he happens to be right. - Damon)

In other words, if this reform effort fails, YOU pay. YOU pay higher taxes because the multitudes of uninsured will be forced into ERs - YOU will have less money to spend because costs will continue to spiral while your wages stagnate.
If you want that, then by all means fight the President's proposal - but don't even THINK about complaining to me when you lose your coverage. My sympathy will be shockingly limited.

What Healthcare reform means to YOU...

2009-08-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Start on the upper left:

Any questions?

Jon Stewart on the Great healthcare debate...

2009-08-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck VS....GLENN BECK?!?

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-13-2009/glenn-beck-s-operation

Seems as if his opinion about our nation's haelth care system has changed DRAMATICALLY over the last year and a half...

Actually, turns out Sarah Palin's RIGHT...

2009-08-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

There ARE "Death Panels". Only the Government has nothing to do with them.

As Joe Conason writes:

When Republican politicians and right-wing talking heads bemoan the fictitious “death panels” that they claim would arise from health care reform, they are concealing a sinister reality from their followers. The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.

The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers, and is almost certainly rising as more and more people lose their coverage as costs continue to go up.

They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of survival.

This isn’t news. Seven years ago, the Institute of Medicine found that approximately 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they had no insurance. Using the same methodology combined with Census Bureau estimates of health coverage, the Urban Institute concluded that the incidence of death among the uninsured was enormous. Between 2000 and 2006, the last year of that study, the total number of dead was estimated to have reached 137,000—a body count more than double the number of casualties in the Vietnam War.

The Institute of Medicine also found that uninsured adults are 25 percent more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health insurance, and other studies have warned that uninsured adults between the ages of 55 and 64 are even more prone to die prematurely. A lack of health insurance is the third-leading cause of death for that age cohort, following heart disease and cancer.

All those appalling figures, which are real rather than mythical, do not include the casualties of insurance company profiteering—namely, all the people, including small children, who perish because of the anonymous “death panels” that deny or delay coverage to consumers. Perhaps the most notorious case in recent years was that of Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old leukemia patient whose liver transplant was held up by insurance giant Cigna HealthCare. She died for no reason except to protect Cigna’s profit margin, but her unnecessary and cruel demise was hardly unique.

Research by the American Medical Association found that the nation’s largest insurance companies deny somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of all the claims submitted by doctors. That rough estimate is the best available because private insurers are not required to reveal such statistics (although they certainly maintain them), and the government does not collect them. But in June, a House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation found that three major insurance companies—Golden Rule, Assurant and WellPoint—rescinded the coverage of at least 20,000 people between 2003 and 2007 for minor errors, including typos, on their paperwork; a preexisting condition; or a family member’s medical history.

“They try to find something—anything—so they can say that this individual was not truthful,” said Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who oversaw the committee probe. He warned that insurance companies launch these nitpicking inquisitions whenever a policyholder becomes ill with a certain kind of condition—usually a costly and deadly one, such as ovarian cancer or leukemia. The result is denial and loss of coverage—and we now know that means increased mortality for innocent people.

So who are the members of the death panels?

You can find them among the corporate bureaucrats who concoct excuses to deny coverage and throw the sick off their rolls. You can find them among the politicians and lobbyists who have stalled reform for years while people died. You can find them among the morons who show up to shout slogans at town halls rather than seek solutions. And you can find them among the cable and radio blabbers, who invent scary stories about reform to conceal the sickening truth.

An Evangelical Minister speaks on the Health care debate

2009-08-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

Jim Wallis is an Evangelical Minister Editor-In-Chief of Sojurners magazine

To get working links and so forth, go to http://blog.sojo.net/2009/08/12/we-must-act-on-health-care/

As a nation, we are engaged in making decisions about our health care that will impact our families and communities for generations to come.

And I must personally share with you that I’ve had enough of the misinformation and, frankly, misleading statements coming from those who oppose the transformation of a health system that currently renders the best health care to the wealthiest, depletes the savings of solidly middle-class Americans, and leaves 46 million people with no health-care coverage at all.

We don’t have to fall victim to the naysayers – those seeking to prop up the status quo and sustain the profits of the massive insurance corporations.

Business as usual is not what we’re about. It’s not what change is about. It’s certainly not what people of good will from all faiths, who embrace the Golden Rule and seek the common ground of justice and fairness, are about.

During the last big national debate on health-care reform in the early 1990s, the religious community mostly stayed out of the discussion. Not this time.

A friend of mine recently traveled across several states in the U.S. visiting friends on summer vacation. He told me that, everywhere he went, people asked him to read e-mails they’d received. These e-mails had no author and no citations to support the misleading statements about health-care reform they contained – including the false claim that, if health-care reform passed, it would force families to see doctors and receive care dictated by a government panel. This is not true.

At a recent meeting of leading faith groups in Washington, D.C., a leader of a large, national organization said they were receiving calls asking if the elderly would be simply left to die if health-care reform passed. The answer is NO.

These egregious and false accusations are being created for only one purpose: to manipulate and instill fear in American citizens.

This must stop. We are the ones who can stop it. Together, speaking out, acting out, and joining as one on a mission, we can push back the clouds of misinformation and fear-mongering, and allow the light of truth to shine through.

Today, right now, let’s join together making the health-care debate factual, worthy of our families and communities. Let’s put the special interests on notice that we want real health-care reform, not misinformation and fear-mongering.

Sojourners has created a rapid response Web site where you will find what you need to fight for the truth: Sojourners’ Health Care Reform Resources.

At this Web site I want you to:

SIGN Sojourners’ Health-Care Creed and let Congress know you stand for values-based reform.

SHARE Sojourners’ Guide to the Health-Care Reform Debate with your church and neighbors.

DISTRIBUTE Sojourners’ two-page flyer with health-care reform facts and values at your small group or Bible study.

USE the messages and talking points that Sojourners has created in your discussions with others.

CALL your Members of Congress today, toll-free, at #1-866-279-5474 and ask them to vote for health-care reform.

We must act.

We must speak out in our communities, schools, and workplaces. If we all take part, then our voices will join thousands of others across the nation. Other things you can do include writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper supporting health-care reform.

I pledge to you that I will do my part by keeping you updated on what’s happening here in Washington, D.C. Be prepared to receive action requests and notifications of conference calls that you should join.

Together, imagine the thousands of faithful voices speaking out, in unison – with all joining in.

Together, we can bring about the most sweeping change to our health-care system in history.

Together, passing health-care reform for our families is what people of good will from all faiths, who embrace the Golden Rule and seek the common ground of justice and fairness, can do. Join me.

Olbermann strikes again...

2009-08-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

This time on Right-wing fearmongering, like Sarah Palin and the "Death Panels" that don't exist...

A relevant cartoon...

2009-08-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

Here's something about Government-run health care...

2009-08-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

Since 1964, Medicare has provided health care insurance for more than 100 million Americans...
no Medicare participant has ever been denied coverage because of a previous medical problem...
or because of a change or loss of a job...
No medicare participant has ever been told which physician he can or can't use...
or had his deductibles go up by 50% without warning...
No Medicare participant has had to send 15 letters to get her medical bills paid...
or had her contributions go toward a billion-dollar bonus for the head of Medicare...
As a percentage of the minimum wage, Medicare premiums have gone up only 20% in 45 years while covering everyone eligible...
while the average private health insurance premium has gone up 200% in the last 5 years, despite denying coverage to millions who need it most...

This is the so-called government-run health care that the right wingers want you to be afraid of. What they're afraid of is losing donations from the private health insurance lobby.

A Tip for The GOP: Look Away

2009-08-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

This from a CONSERVATIVE columnist:

By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Southern writer Walker Percy liked to poke fun at Ohioans in his novels, just to even things out a bit.

"Usually Mississippians and Georgians are getting it from everybody, and Alabamians," he once explained to an interviewer. "So, what's wrong with making smart-aleck remarks about Ohio? Nobody puts Ohio down. Why shouldn't I put Ohio down?"

Percy, the genial genius, laughed at his own remark.

Now, apparently, it's the Buckeye State's turn to poke back. In a fusillade of pique, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich charged that Southerners are what's wrong with the Republican Party.

"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," he told an interviewer with the Columbus Dispatch, referring to GOP senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma. "It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?' "

Down South, people are trying to figure out what "errrr, errrrr" means. Jack Bass, author of eight books about social and political change in the South, speculated in an e-mail that Voinovich really meant grrrr, grrrrr, as in "growling canines whose bark scares more than do Obama's purrs, especially with the Dow at a nine-month high."

Whatever Voinovich's sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.

Alas, Voinovich was not entirely wrong.

Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon line and increasingly associated with some of the South's worst ideas.

It is not helpful (or surprising) that "birthers" -- conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is not a native son -- have assumed kudzu qualities among Republicans in the South. In a poll commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos, participants were asked: "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?"

Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure.

Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.

Though Voinovich's views may be shared by others in the party, it's a tad late -- not to mention ungrateful -- to indict the South. Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the civil rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn't just whistling Dixie.

A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: "Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, 'burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, 'This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.' "

That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners weaned on Harper Lee heard the dog whistle.

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base -- including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country -- but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

What the GOP is experiencing now, one hopes, are the death throes of that 50-year spell that Johnson foretold. But before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again, Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.

kathleenparker@washpost.com

Keith Olbermann's being mealy mouthed again...

2009-08-03T21:59:00.001-07:00

Man NEVER says what he thinks...:-)

Got this from a Canadian friend...

2009-07-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

And thought it worthwhile in the light of current events:

As a Canadian I marvel at all of these terms that are so common to Americans, but are virtually unknown to us.

Here's a partial list off the top of my head:

1. "Out of network"
There are no "networks" in Canada. Doctors and hospitals are not affiliated with private insurance companies. Doctors are private business entities and hospitals are usually run by non-profit boards or regional health associations.

2. "COBRA"
Health coverage is NOT tied to your place of employment in any way. So any COBRA-like scheme is unnecessary.

3. "Co-Pay"
The government pays 100% of basic care, 100% of the time. Drugs are not covered, but are subsidized by government to a point. And because of mass buys, discounts are obtained from the drug companies. That's why our prices are so much lower. Most employers offer a drug plan that pays for 100% of drug cost coverage.

4. "monthly premium\deductible"
Wazzat? We don't consider our health to be the same as our possessions.

5. "waiting for approval"
Doctors are the sole decision makers for health care. NOBODY influences or delays their decisions, warns them of costs or prevents them from giving treatment for any reason.

6. "Government interference"
The provincial government in each province PAYS for whatever services doctors provide. No questions asked. Unless the procedure is experimental, not medically necessary or unwarranted, doctors cannot deny basic care - by law.

7. "Health insurance lobby"
There are NO insurance companies for basic care, only companies for providing insurance for travelers. No money to be made here.

8. "bureaucracy"
When we visit a hospital or doctor's office, we walk in, get treated, walk out. No "applications", "registrations" or any other kind of paperwork is required. We NEVER have to talk to a single "government official" or wait for a "judgment".

9. "PRE-EXISTING CONDITION"
This is such a foreign concept to us. A Canadian's usual reaction to the explanation of this term is astonishment.

I'm glad to see that a sane health care system is within reach in America. Fight for it. It's WORTH it.

Something I've been up to lately...

2009-07-16T19:50:00.000-07:00

This is a little project I'm working on - met Matt's brother Roland thru the latter's company, Science Castle. Matt was handling video for one of the classes I taught for Science Castle, and was impressed enough with the caliber of my voice work to ask me to help him with this. I had ENORMOUS fun with it. If it goes viral the way Matt's aiming for, we may even make a small 15-minute feature of it.
So spread the word!

Recycling at its coolest...

2009-06-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

BIG thanks to my dad for passing this along - a hotel in Costa Rica has refurbished a Boeing 727 airframe and turned it into a hotel suite, of all things!

The fully outfitted, meticulously detailed, two bedroom, Boeing 727 fuselage suite. We have refurbished a vintage 1965 Boeing 727 airframe, which in its prior life shuttled globetrotters on South Africa Air and Avianca Airlines ( Colombia ).

Our phoenix is now ready for its future duty as the most exclusive hotel suite in Costa Rica.

Need a getaway place?

727 Home Entrance

We salvaged this airframe, piece by piece, from its San Jose airport resting place. We carefully transported the pieces on five, big-rig trucks to the jungles of Manuel Antonio where they have been resurrected into a unique jumbo hotel suite. Our classic airplane, nestled on the edge of the National Park in our Costa Verde II area, is perched on a 50-foot pedestal. At this height, you will enjoy scenic ocean and jungle views from the hard wood deck built atop the plane's former right wing.

The plane's interior is Costa Rican teak paneling from the cockpit to the tail. Furnishings are hand-carved, teak furniture from Java , Indonesia Our 727 home features two air conditioned bedrooms--one with two queen sized beds and the other with one queen sized bed, each with its own private bath-a flat screen TV, a kitchenette, dining area foyer; an ocean view terrace; a private entrance up a river rock, spiral staircase; and 360 degrees of surrounding gardens.

Enjoy an evening on the terrace while sipping a glass of wine and observing your tree top neighbors: sloths, toucans and monkeys................

Our refurbished Boeing 727 home is not the only such dwelling in the world: We were inspired by a Forbes Magazine article about a company offering hurricane-proof living via surplus Boeing 727 airframes! Of course, we were intrigued and found some new ways to introduce convenience and luxury to this very prosaic bit of aluminum scrap. We are sure you will agree with us!

TV Area

Kitchenette Dining Foyer

Master Bedroom

Master Bath

Second Bedroom

Wing Balcony

Ocean View From 727 Balcony

Amplified Balcony View

Rates:
From January 2, 2009 - April 30, 2009 $350.00 daily plus tax

From May 01, 2009 - Nov 17, 2009 $300.00 daily plus tax

Heckuva deal, I'd say...

An Editorial in Today's New York Times...

2009-06-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

This hits EXACTLY what I've been saying...

The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
By FRANK RICH
WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.

And now, the backlash:

2009-06-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

Because Shepard Smith of Fox News had the temerity to call it like he saw it, the Right is now calling for his head. The whole article can be found atMediaMatters.com.

On June 10, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith said the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting validated a recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report alerting law enforcement to an increased threat from "rightwing extremists," including "white supremacists." Smith said: "[T]his is a former military guy and he's gone extremist. They were warning us for a reason -- not about something political or social or anything else. ... It was a warning to us all. And it appears now that they were right." Smith also said that he's receiving "more and more frightening" emails from viewers since President Obama's election, including conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate. In response to Smith's remarks about the Holocaust museum shooting, several conservative media figures have attacked Smith or called for his firing from Fox News.

Sorry folks, but Jew-hating Holocaust deniers ARE extreme rightists. And DHS is correct. Anybody remember Timothy McVeigh? His ilk is on the rise again, and they're being egged on by the likes of Beck, Hannity, Coulter and Limbaugh - though, like all good neocons, they're accountability-averse. They'll continue to claim thay have no responsibility for this while simultaneously blaming the "liberal" media for the decline of American culture.
I wonder if they ever actually listen to what comes out of their mouths?

Whoa...

2009-06-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Even FOX news is starting to connect the dots:

Wouldn't have expected this from them.

Now, THIS is funny...

2009-06-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

The opening bit from "Frasier" on 2/11/99 - 6 minutes of some of the best physical comedy you'll ever see. David Hyde-Pierce turns in a bravura performance:

Good Lord, they've gone utterly around the bend...

2009-06-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

The right wing in this country has officially gone into "wackyland".

And that's a bad thing, as surprised as some of you may be to hear that from me. We NEED a viable opposition party in this country - one-party rule is a little too "politburo" for my liking. But the Republicans aren't it anymore - they have gone utterly, certifiably, NUTS.

As evidence, I cite as Exhibit A Rush Limbaugh's recent call to boycott GM until the government gets out of it. Brilliance! Let's hurt AMERICAN workers and send MORE money overseas because we don't like the President! let's put MORE people out of work and put our economy in even worse shape than it's already in! THAT will show Washigton who's boss! Let's destroy our national economy to prove we're right!

Rush, you're still on the drugs, aren't you?

As Exhibit B - M, I give you the recent article in Salon Titled "Crazy Right-Wing Myths About Obama", which sums these up better than I could - tells you what they are, and who's spreading them. WARNING - you may feel your own sanity slipping away as you read this...these are THAT nutso.

And finally, as Exhibit N, we're back to Rush, and his now-famous declaration "I hope he (Obama) fails". For heaven's sake, this is like being on an airliner and hoping your pilot fails because you don't like his views on universal health care!
Stone-cold fact, folks: Obama fails, we are ALL screwed.

And as to the right wing's newly-rediscovered fiscal responsiblity: where were these guys when Bush and the GOP Congress were taking surpluses and turning them to record deficits? Resoundingly silent, is where they were. The GOP drove this country into a ditch (AGAIN - just like in 1896, 1929, and 1991), and now they're gonna bitch about the cost of the tow truck!

Priceless...and certifiably insane.

The SOCIALISM, you say!

2009-06-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

Many on the right are having a field day with the "Obama's a Socialist - America's becoming a Socialist nation!" theme of late. So let's look at it objectively:
Merriam-Webster defines "Socialism" as follows:

1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

OK, so it seems like, in Socialism, government owns and/or controls most businesses and functions thereof. Are we close to this situation?
NOTE: since the text in the image is unclear, I'll point out that the BLUE area is the percentage of American corporate and business assets currently NOT held by the US government; RED represents those that are so held.

Doesn't seem like it - not even close.
Does the right ever get tired of being proven wrong? Hasn't seemed to slow them down yet.

Rare Flyby

2009-05-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, I was at the Watsonville Fly-in and Airshow, and saw this:
A formation flyby of a P-51, a P-40 (of Flying Tigers fame), and an F6F Hellcat. It's not often one gets to see living history this closely.

A bad day for a President...

2009-05-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

Shortly after a snowy night in DC, Barack Obama wakes up, looks out the window, and sees that SOMEBODY has pissed the words "OBAMA SUCKS" into the snow. Livid, he calls in the Secret Service and FBI and demand they find out who did it.

Later, the head of the Secret Service detail reports back.

"Mr. President, we know who the culprit is."

"Well, tell me!' says the Prez.

"You're not gonna like it, sir."

"Tell me anyway. I'm a grown man - I can handle it."

"All right, Mr. President. DNA analysis is conclusive - the urine is Joe Biden's."

"Oh, my God! My own Vice President?!?"

"It's worse than that, sir."

"How could it possibly be worse?"

"It's Michelle's handwriting."

Ba-DUMP! PISH!

Talk about "Finishing Strong"...!

2009-05-04T10:09:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I put up a post featuring a video that asked "are you going to finish strong?", which was, I think, inspiring to us all.
Now, just this last weekend, we've seen a real example.
Here is a replay of the 2009 Kentucky Derby; keep your eye on the horse that's DEAD LAST:

MINE THAT BIRD was so far behind halfway through the race even his owners didn't think he could win. The horse thought differently - he had no clue he was a 50-1 longshot. As Garfield the Cat once said: :"It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't know what you can't do."
THAT'S what "finish strong" means. It didn't matter he was dead last through most of the race - he finished strong, and won. And the same goes for YOU. You may be WAY behind the pack. You may feel like you're dead last. But you can win if you finish strong.

Some thoughts on "enhanced interrogation"

2009-04-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

Used to be, waterboarding was a war crime. We prosecuted, and even executed, individuals for doing it, as explained in this editorial by a former JAG (Judge Advocate General)in the Nevada National Guard.
Even Reagan's DOJ prosecuted for this in
1983.
So could someone please explain to me WHY, if it was a war crime for the Japanese to do this to our soldiers, and it was worth a 10-year prison sentence for a Texas Sheriff, it is NOT worth investigating and/or prosecuting?
This is something Obama's AG has simply GOT to push on - if the people who allowed this nation to torture in our name are not held accountable, what message does that send to (a) the civilized world, and (b) our kids? If we're not going to respect the rule of law, what earthly right do we have to complain if they don't?

ONE decision...(Part 5 - the Thrilling Conclusion)

2009-04-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

An interesting side benefit of Chamberlain's pivotal decision, one largely overlooked by scholars and historians, is the presence of a hedge of thorns. First mentioned in the Bible (perhaps my Minister Cousin Randy can supply chapter & verse), a "hedge of thorns" is the Divine protection placed upon someone destined to make a difference. Until you have accomplished what you were sent here to do, you will not - you CANNOT - be harmed. Joshua Chamberlain, on Little Round Top that July day, his choice not yet made, was wrapped in that hedge of thorns.

I can hear you scoff.

So I shall enter into evidence a letter addressed to "The Honorable Governor Joshua L. Chamberlain", which arrived at the Maine Statehouse some years after the war.
The letter reads:

Dear Sir:
I want to tell you of a little passage in the Battle of Round Top, Gettysburg, concerning you and me, which I am now glad of. Twice in that fight I had your life in my hands. I got a safe place between two rocks, and drew bead fair and square on you. You were standing in the open behind the center of your line, full exposed. I knew your rank by your uniform and actions, and I thought it a mighty good thing to put you out of the way. I rested my gun on the rock and took steady aim. I started to pull the trigger, but then some queer notion stopped me. Then I got ashamed of my weakness and went through the same motions again. I had you, perfectly certain. But that same queer something shut right down on me. I couldn't pull the trigger, and, gave it up - that is, your life. I am glad of it now, and hope you are.
Yours Truly,
A Member of the Fifteenth Alabama

You too, right here, right now, are under this same hedge-of-thorns protection. You may feel fear, but it is illusion. Until you have done what you were put on this earth to do, you will. not. be. harmed.

It all boils down to this: your story, circumstances, and timing may not be as dramatic as Chamberlain's, but the stakes are the same. There is a time in every person's life where a decision is required. That decision, should you make it, will have a far-reaching effect on generations yet unborn. There is a thin thread that extends from you to tens - no, hundreds of thousands of lives. The example you set, the actions you take, and yes, even ONE DECISION you make will literally change the world.

A decision - to charge.

So do it. Change your life. Change your family's future. Change the world.

Charge.

ONE decision...(Part 4)

2009-04-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

Aha! You thought I was done, didn't you? Silly you...

Chamberlain's improbable charge was not without personal benefits as well. In addition to his CMH, he led successful campaigns until the end of the war, being decorated 4 separate times for bravery, eventually being promoted to Major General.

Among all Union officers, it was Joshua Chamberlain whom Lincoln selected to receive the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. There Chamberlain stunned the world and began the healing of his nation with a display of forgiveness and respect - ordering his men to attention and SALUTING Robert E. Lee and the defeated South.

Returning home to Maine, Chamberlain was elected Governor by what remains to this day the largest margin in state history. He served four terms as Governor of Maine, and then stepped down, returning to Bowdoin College - this time as its President.

Now we get to the interesting part of this story.

As the late Paul Harvey was known to say, "...in a moment, you'll hear...the REST of the story."
(TBC, yet again...)

ONE decision...(Part 3)

2009-04-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

...You're thinking, "great story, but you're telling me I can change the world? Gimme a break!" You're about to say (if you haven't already) "c'mon! Even Joshua Chamberlain only changed one small part of one battle!"

Oh, really?

Chew on this: it's well known that, up until Gettysburg, the Union was pretty well getting handed its head. They'd lost Fort Sumter, gotten their asses kicked TWICE at Manassas (or Bull Run, if you prefer), lost decisively in the Battles of the Seven Days near Richmond, were defeated soundly at Chancellorsville, and CRUSHED at Fredricksburg.
Had the South won Gettysburg, Historians are almost unanimous that the war would have been over by September 1st. The CSA (Confederate States of America) was ONE VICTORY away from winning the Civil War - but they didn't win.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his action at Little Round Top. His commanding officers held that the actions of this one man saved the entire 80,000-man Union Army from certain destruction - this one man turned the tide of the entire battle.

By turning the tide of the Battle of Gettysburg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain turned the tide of the ENTIRE CIVIL WAR.

Do you realize what that means?

If the South wins, there is no USA as we know it. There are two - perhaps three nations in its place. There is no country big enough and strong enough to help feed the world; there is no superpower to defend weaker societies against those who would restrict their freedom. All this DIDN'T happen because one. Ordinary. Individual. Made a decision to move forward.
When Hitler laid Europe under a boot of iron, when Japan systematically conquered the Pacific islands, when Eastern Europe lay behind the Iron Curtain, when Saddam Hussein rolled his troops into Kuwait, there was a UNITED States of America to stand in the way - because of one man with his back to the wall. A man who was in fear for his life. A man whose only option seemed to be retreat.
The world as it exists today is, in large part, is the result of that decision to charge - one decision made by a schoolteacher on a hot, humid July day almost a century and a half ago! Don't you DARE think you can't change things!

ONE decision, made by YOU, can change the world! With this power at our command, WHAT do we have to fear?

(to be Continued...)

ONE decision...(Part 2)

2009-04-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

Chamberlain's officers pleaded with him to retreat, to save what was left of the regiment from certain destruction. After a few moments' consideration, with the Rebel Yell ringing in their ears, Chamberlain gave the order:

"Fix bayonets."

His officers & sergeants couldn't believe their ears. Chamberlain repeated the order, and as the remnants of the 20th Maine Regiment frantically attached their bayonets, Chamberlain leaped on top of the wall, drew his sword, pointed it at the onrushing Confederates, and shouted the order; "CHARGE!"

And the 20th Maine followed their schoolteacher leader into history.

When the Confederate troops saw the leader of the opposition mount the wall, they immediately stopped, unsure of what was happening. And when Chamberlain pointed his sword at them and ordered his men to charge, they LITERALLY turned and ran. Many of them threw down their loaded weapons, certain these could not be the same men they'd been facing - there must have been massive reinforcements. In their minds, it was not even in the realm of possibility that a chewed-up regiment would charge.

In under 10 minutes, the ragged remnants of the 20th Maine, TOTALLY out of ammunition by this point, captured the entire regiments of the 15th Alabama and the 47th Alabama - over 400 men. It all happened because one man made the decision to charge.

And one decision that YOU make can change the world.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking...

(to be continued...)

ONE decision...(Part 1)

2009-04-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

made by an ordinary person, can change the world.
Don't think so?
Then it's time to fire up the WayBack machine...
To July 2nd, 1863, where a schoolteacher in mortal peril did just that.

...

His name was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor of Rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Maine. But on this day, he was a Colonel in the Union Army, in command of the
20th Maine Regiment. 20th Maine was that day defending a hill called Little Round Top just outside of a small Pennsylvania town named Gettysburg.

Yes. That Gettysburg.

Little Round Top and the 20th Maine were on the left end of the Union line, and were in a critical position; if the Confederates could get around, or through, them, they would be able to wreak havoc behind the Union line, cutting off any possibility of retreat. Basically, if the 20th Maine were overrun, the battle was lost.

Already this day, the 20th Maine had aquitted itself nobly; it had held off four full Confederate attacks, the last actually reaching the wall the 20th was using as a fortification. Chamberlain's men had literally been punching Confederates in the face - combat had gotten THAT close. But not without cost. Col. Chamberlain had lost over half his men, and almost a third of those remaining were wounded. His line was thin indeed.

As the Confederates gathered for another charge, Chamberlain quickly surveyed his situation. He found that they were so low on ammuntion as to have only 2 rounds per man left. The 20th Maine was, for all intents and purposes, OUT of ammunition, outnumbered five-to-one, and the Confederates were beginning their charge.

(to be Continued...)

Jon Stewart Strikes again!

2009-04-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Baracknophobia - Obey

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Robert DeNiro on SNL

2009-04-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

How he did this without busting a gut laughing, I may never understand...

"See the Good"

2009-03-29T15:13:00.000-07:00

This is a song I heard just a couple weeks ago and utterly fell in love with. It was written by my friends Danielle Kane (nee Bixby) and Rick Vandivier, and I performed it(with a few tweaks, as I'm nowhere NEAR the guitarist that Rick is)at the 3/29/09 service at Unity of Fremont, CA. So here's my version:

Again I say - "impossible" doesn't exist!

2009-03-27T10:33:00.001-07:00

Thanks to my friend Ed for sending me this. A man whose car is caught UNDER an overturned semi - AND WALKS AWAY.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Spock!

2009-03-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Today is Leonard Nimoy's 78th birthday! Born on March 26, 1931, Nimoy is best known for playing The half-Human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock on Star Trek - a role he will in part reprise in the new "rebooted" Star Trek movie coming out in early May.