Tuesday, August 31, 2010

I'm Voting Republican!

Hello, I'm a liberal. And of course we all know what that means. According to that unimpeachable font of truth and insight, El Snortbo (Rush Limbaugh), and his GOPunditry bretheren that makes me one of the Hate America First Crowd. And because we know by the quality of the source this MUST be true. And being that I do not have the memory of a gnat nor the grasp of an ameoba, and I understand how we got into the messes we're in and who is responsible for that, I'm VOTING REPUBLICAN. In fact I'm going Teabag all the way this fall!

If the America I hate (according Mr. Snortbo) is to fall then who better to bring that to fruition than the most extreme Republicans we can get? Who else will:

Lead us into expensive foreign misadventures for fun and profit spending blood and treasure, bankrupting us and making us hated and mistrusted by more and more of the rest world, even our allies?

Lead us into free trade where we trade away our jobs, our livelihoods, our know-how and even our sovereignty to benefit the few of us who make their fortunes as CEOs and major shareholders in nationless corporations.

Lead us into free-market fundamentalism, where the wise and all knowing hand of the market place (and those who manipulate it and make the rules) undermine the public interest and the middle class for their narrow selfish interest.

Lead us into deregulatory shangra-la where our money isn’t safe from predators, let alone our workers, environment, food, economy or our consumers.

Lead us into the redistribution of wealth where more and more of the resources generated by our people and our land are concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer mega-rich who wield their money as political weapon against We The People to control our government and reap even more for themselves.

Lead us into ignorance where public education is destroyed to create a large underclass of insecure, low cost workers and where science that threatens interests of the economic powers that be is twisted and undermined in the short-term interest of the few.

Lead us into fundamentalist religiousity, backward thinking and vile xenophobia that we might emulate the piety of the dark ages once more.

Lead us into hatred, fear division and manipulation by the GOPunditry and their incessant GOPropaganda lies and create an ingorant electorate in capable of informed self governance.

Yes that pinnacle of virtue, El Snortbo has most truthfully proclaimed that as a Liberal, I hate everything about America. And that’s why I’m voting Republican, to take our country back(wards)!

If you hate America like I do, please help add to my list of Republican attributes so that we can convince all good America hating liberals and independants to hand supreme power to the Republican party and end this America once for all!

Monday, August 30, 2010

Bush hands Obama the Deficits

A Con recently asked me; “So if Reagan and Bush spend too much, it is bad. Yet when Obama spends as much and a hell of a lot more, it is stimulus and therefor good? Why isn't the spending of Reagan and Bush considered stimulus and therefor good? Why isn't Obama's spending considered excessive and therefor bad?”

Answer: The Republican S$^% sandwich handed to us all. Obama’s deficits were written in long before he took office. The current deficits are the result of the Republic Wars, the Republican Tax Cuts for the Rich and the of course the Great Republican Recession and resultant Republican reduced tax revenues.

So you see the very question asked is a deception, they are not really Obama's deficits. and yet this is the false mantra of GOPster Party and their GOPunditry. Yeah so the Con movement runs on lies, we all know that right? Wrong too many Americans watch Fux Snooze, have their brain put to sleep and are actually considering handing power back to the jerks that are the cause of it all!

You can read about the REAL sources of the deficits in the link below or in the excerpts I’ve provided. Bon Apetite.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036

Whoever won the presidency in 2008 was going to face a grim fiscal situation, a fact already well known as the presidential campaign got underway. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) presented a sobering outlook in its 2008 summer update,[1] and during the autumn, the news got relentlessly worse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that became embroiled in the housing meltdown, failed in early September; two big financial firms — AIG and Lehman Brothers — collapsed soon thereafter; and others teetered. In December 2008, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the nation was in recession and pegged the starting date as December 2007. By the time CBO issued its new projections on January 7, 2009 — two weeks before Inauguration Day — it had already put the 2009 deficit at well over $1 trillion.[2]

The government put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship in September 2008.[4] In October of that year, the Bush Administration and Congress enacted a rescue package to stabilize the financial system by creating the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Together, TARP and the GSEs accounted for $245 billion (including extra debt-service costs) of fiscal 2009’s record deficit.

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [6] (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers (see Figure 1).

President Obama’s 2011 budget proposes to reduce anticipated deficits over the next ten years, chiefly by letting the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers expire on schedule, closing certain tax loopholes and reforming the international tax system, keeping estate taxes at their 2009 parameters, enacting health care reform, and freezing (in aggregate) most appropriations for non-security domestic programs for the next three years. The President also supports another round of temporary recovery measures that would boost the deficit in 2010 through 2012, a proposal that is appropriate in size and well targeted.[8] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ analyses have found that in aggregate, the President’s proposals would reduce deficits over the 2011-2020 period by an estimated $1.3 trillion.[9]

The health reform legislation begins that process. It takes important initial steps to restructure the health care payment and delivery systems and to move away from paying providers for more visits or procedures and toward rewarding effective, high-value health care. As we learn more about how to slow health care cost growth without endangering health care quality, strong additional measures will be essential. But restraining health care cost growth will not itself be sufficient to address the long-term fiscal problem. Other actions also will be needed, including steps to raise additional revenue and make changes in other programs.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Drink to your Health!

I went to a grocery store last weekend and out front there was a group of people who were raising money for a kid who has contracted Type 2 Diabetes, what was once refered to as Adult Onset Diabetes. It was bizzare though because in order to raise the funds they selling candy bars, soda and potato chips. I wonder if they were completely unconscious of the irony or if perhaps they were trying to help share their experience with the friends and families of others.

But what was really disturbing about the scene was their apparently complete lack in understanding of the American health care system. Everyone knows that the appropriate response to a catastrophic or chronic health problem in these United States (even more particularly in Wisconsin!) is to hold a charity fundraiser at a bar. That way everybody can have a great time, raise a completely inadequate sum of money compared to the mounting and on-going medical bills while soothing their consciences with the falacy that they actually accomplished something good and meaningful while swilling thier beer. Why it's a win/lose/win proposition and hell, two outta three ain't bad!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

David Stockman - Republicans Should Declare Bankruptcy

In an a NY Time OpEd piece, Four Deformations of the Apocalypse http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 Reagan's former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman blames extreme Republican ideology for the coming American economic apocalypse and states that their current insistence on extending the unaffordable Bush tax cuts so that the weathiest among us don't have to bear a mere 3% more in righting what's wrong is tantamount to the GOP declaring bankruptcy.

Deformation #1: At the urging of Failed Free-Market Fundamentalist Milton Freidman, Nixon takes us off the gold standard resulting fiscal irresponsibility and the rampant printing of money.

Deformation #2: Crushing debt from domestic excesses war mongering and the adoption three decades ago of the Republican religion that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts.

Deformation #3: The vast, deadly and unproductive expansion of Wall Street and the too greedy to fail banksters, whome he calls "wards of the state". (Or is it the other way around?)

Deformation #4: A war on the middle class and working families where the
top 1 percent of Americans received two-thirds of the gain in national income from the failing Wall Street casino while the bottom 90 percent got only 12 percent from Main Street. (Don't believe in the redistribution of wealth? There it is!)

Conclusion: The day of reckoning is close at hand and the Republican Party offers an irrelevant platform of ideological, bankrupt policies.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Mayor Bloomberg Makes Me Proud to be an American!

"We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We've come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever – this is the freest City in the world. That's what makes New York special and different and strong.

"Our doors are open to everyone – everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants – by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

"We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life and it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.

"No one should be asked to leave their neighborhood. This is our neighborhood and we've been part of it for 27 years. Our opponents are not from this neighborhood."

"On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.

"Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue – and they were turned down.

"In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies – and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

"In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion – and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780's – St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

"This morning, the City's Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted not to extend landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.

"The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.

"The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves – and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans – if we said 'no' to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.

"Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values – and play into our enemies' hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that.

"For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – as important a test – and it is critically important that we get it right.

"On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked 'What God do you pray to?' 'What beliefs do you hold?'

"The attack was an act of war – and our first responders defended not only our City but also our country and our Constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights – and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

"Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation – and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for the better part of a year, as is their right.

"The local community board in Lower Manhattan voted overwhelming to support the proposal and if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.

"Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure – and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God's love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest."

Monday, August 02, 2010

La La La La, La La La La Nemo's World!

I've been taking Denis and Nemo to task at http://freeracine.blogspot.com/ for their belief in the twin lies of "failing Public Schools" and "legions of Bad teachers" which of course is GOPropaganda framing to attack public schools and teachers unions for cynical political purposes only. Schools don't fail, students do. And it's obvious that students living in areas of concentrated poverty fail in concentrated numbers. But of course to these two and the rest of the Cons, it's not the concentrated poverty and all the social ills that go with it, it's the schools fault and the teachers fault even though the rest of our public, unionized schools are doing well and have for generations.

Anyway, Nemo asked me a question about a source which I answered and appologized for. I asked him to answer questions I've asked him on this site about his sources (or lack thereof) of global warming denial scientists doing actual research for credible institutions. He declined, saying it would be off topic here and Kay would ban him and then passed along this link: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/my-global-warming-skepticism-for-dummies/

So I've elected to give Nemo his legit link so he can explain how this guy is credible when you consider this: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Roy_Spencer#Opposition_to_evolution_and_embrace_of_.22intelligent_design.22

On the site linked by Nemo, the good doctor goes to great links to say that he's never taken a dime from the fossil industries. The only problem is he was employed writing columns for TCS Daily which was owned by DCI Group, a lobbying firm that works for ExxonMobil. He is also a board Member at the George C Marshall Institute, one of the Merchants of Doubt that works for "sound science" on behalf of . . . you guessed it, the fossil and tobacco industries.

He was a speaker (paid? unpaid?) at an anti-global warming conference sponsored by the Heartland Group. The conference was funded largely by the fossil industry. The Heartland Group is a Public Relations (deception) firm that is funded by the fossil and tobaccoo industries.

Best of all Spencer is a religious nut. He works at the University of Alabama Huntsville along with his reality-denial collegue and fellow fundamentalist nut, Prof. John Christy who, by the way believes that man does not have the power to affect the climate. His position is that only God has that power. The absurdity of which is readily apparent with only the breifest consideration of the man-made destructive force held in the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.

Mr. Spencer believes that intelligent design and not evolution should be taught in our schools and advocates that environmental policy should be based on a biblical view (whatever that is) rather than science. And this guy calls himself a scientist?

Like many deniers (Christy for one) and like our own GOPster state rep Jim Ott, whose special skills involve standing in front of a weather map, pointing and talking, Mr. Spencer is a meteorologist NOT a climatologist.

This is the type of source that Nemo always brings to the table to support his belief in a global climate conspiracy. Anyway, one down. Got any more stellar sources Nemo? How's bout another roughly translated Czech blog? That'd be just spiffy.