So Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. It was just one more excellent move by Joe. She will chew up that phony religious bigot, Mike Pence and spit him out in bloody chunks all over that debate stage.
Now that the Democrats have a sustainable ticket and one that seems able to generate a huge turnout, maybe it’s time to cool their jets on a couple of other fronts.
No one supported the protests more than this writer and no one backed them in print more. But right now there is nothing more to be gained from demonstrations until after the election. No amount of protesting is going to get Trump or his supporters to change their minds, mainly because they don’t think; so there is nothing to be gained by destroying downtown Chicago unless your name is Trump and you can appeal to people who are frightened by the violence.
In another vein, it’s time for the organizers to be making sensible decisions before they haul out the posters and helmets. From what I understand the guy the cops shot in Chicago started the shooting. Hell man, if someone shoots at me I sure in hell shoot back. Why shouldn’t the cops? You have to start making intelligent decisions so that you don’t give cover to the thieves and bad guys. If a guy breaks a window and there’s no demonstration happening around him, he’s just a burglar. Easy bust! We have to stop giving Trump excuses to call out the Gestapo.
I know everyone is all revved up and ready to get something done but nothing’s going to get done for at least six months and maybe more. The Democrats, if they win, won’t take over for more than five months and then they have to organize a government almost from scratch. Trump and his people are such defective lay-a-bouts that we are now operating on a fragment of a normal government in this country. Trump has been trying to run the country like a corner lunch truck. So everything will have to be done from scratch. That will take time. All the crap about this or that being done on “day one” is just political fantasy. That’s not how it works. It’s not how anything works.
The first attack must be on the virus. It’s the most immediate, the most damaging to the people in general and the most threatening. Presidential leadership and edict can deal with that. That doesn’t need congress. But the next thing that must be solved is our healthcare system. Half the people in the country got the shit scared out of them during the Democratic debates over whether or not they might lose their employer supplied healthcare. That shook the Democrats and the Democrats backed off and started talking about letting people keep their employer supplied policies. Then, as if by divine decree, the pandemic hit, companies started going out of business and employer supplied healthcare started disappearing and that’s when all those people who wanted to keep their employer-supplied healthcare decided that they’d settle for any healthcare at all. Now that they had no salary and no healthcare they understood what the progressives were talking about. I’ll get more deeply into healthcare in another blog but suffice it to say that we need and deserve better than we have now.
After healthcare we have to start looking at the environment because that won’t change quickly and because there is still great opposition to doing the right thing.
Then it will be the rest of the long list of things that we must fix. They include but are not limited to infrastructure, the banking system, our military spending, reorganizing our police system, which includes drastically cutting our duplicative police systems like Homeland Security, DEA and Border Patrol.
We must find a better way of dealing with criminals in this country without just setting them free to rob and kill again.
We must also reduce the cost of educating our kids by adding a lot of free education to the process.
So it’s time for everyone who wants the right thing, to do the right thing. Stop getting in the way of the people who are trying to help you. Start paying attention to who the councilmen and congressmen in your district are and what they stand for. And vote, because that’s the impetus of how it starts to get done. The wrong people will not help you. They will only help themselves by grabbing those huge piles of lobby money that flows from too rich scum who look only to perpetuate their selectivity by poisoning your kids and causing the planet to burn. It’s time to get off your asses and help yourselves.
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Donald Trump signed an executive order on Saturday wedging himself into the congressional argument over what the next pandemic relief bill should include. Of course being a Trump makes him a natural screw-up so the bill is heavily flawed. But let’s look at a couple of the problems. The most obvious from this writer’s POV is the payroll tax suspension. First, it does nothing for those who are unemployed because they don’t get a salary so there is no payroll tax to suspend. What it does do is remove the amount of payroll tax that the average wage earner is accumulating in their social security tax fund meaning, when they retire and need that money to support themselves it won’t be there. But that isn’t even the whole problem because Trump aims to defer the tax until after the election, which means that those who have had their taxes deferred will then get hit with a huge bill. Trump is betting most people don’t realize this little fact and will think he is doing something for them and will therefore vote for him. He’s doing the same thing he has always done politically, depending on the stupidity of his followers to buy his bullshit.
He also wants to suspend student loan payments, which is a good thing, at least for the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any aid to states in Trump’s version of the bill. This is a morally corrupt and dangerous omission because he has already abandoned the states by his absence of leadership and they have almost all gone into huge debt in the fight against the virus and now are in desperate need of help.
What has allowed Trump to step into this huge void is that the Democrats and the GOP can’t come to an agreement on a new bill. The Dems want to spend $3 trillion whereas the GOP doesn’t want to spend one cent, so Trump, seeing a chance for political gain, jumped in with his proposal. The Dems offered to cut their request to $2 trillion but the GOP refuses to come up at all. This after they did earlier tax deals that put us in debt before the pandemic just so they could get tax breaks for the already rich.
Chuck Schumer clearly and concisely explained the details of the proposals and the negotiations on This Week last Sunday, but host George Stephanopoulos muddied everything up by inviting Larry Kudlow, minor economist and Trump lackey, to give the administrations view. Kudlow lied so much and so badly that George had to actually call him on his lies, a major stride for the normally gutless Stephanopoulos.
It’s amazing to me that a guy like Kudlow who has extensive radio and TV experience would come on a popular TV show completely unprepared and ready to lie with no real knowledge of the facts of the bill he’s discussing, thereby allowing himself to be exposed before a national audience by a weak host. Of course that’s typical of the Trump administration and all the little pissants that infest it.
One thing that would help is if both sides would take all the extraneous crap out of the bills they are promoting and concentrate on just pandemic related expenses. What am I talking about? Well, the Democrats have included money for proposed election expenses that really belong in a different bill while the GOP is including money for a new FBI building in DC that would mean a big income bump for the Trump hotel down the block. This is just another example of the fact that even when they are fudging, the Democrats do it for a good and useful reason while the Trumpians do it to enrich the Fat Liar in the White House.
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Peter Navarro did his thing on Sunday, appearing on Meet the Press and lying about the president trying to fortify social security when everyone who has ever seen Trump talk about it knows he has been trying to destroy Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare since he learned to babble. Of course Navarro along with Meadows, Mnuchin, Jordan and Graham; all consummate liars, are part of Trump’s coven of democracy haters who if left to their own devices would soon destroy this country. It’s fascinating how Make America Great Again has degenerated into fuck everybody as long as I stay rich. And then Peter Navarro called Donald Trump the hardest working president in history. Of course this only counts if you consider golf as work.
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I don’t see why Donald Trump has to prove exactly how ignorant he really is every single day. Yesterday it was when he spoke about the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, which he informed us, had actually taken place in 1917, not true, and then went on to prove his stupidity when he tried to sell the idea that the Spanish Flu had caused the end of WWII because all the soldiers were sick. I mean really? We know he knows nothing about economics, governance, health, math, the English language or obviously history, so what exactly does he have any workable knowledge of except the tenants of criminal behavior? Why do people want to support him? I can understand a tiny percentage of the idle rich, who know that Trump is good, at least for a while, for their bottom line. Like Trump, they are the greedy swine that care nothing for their country but only have an interest in how rich can they get. They were shown booing on Sunday at a Trump golf club as the Fat Liar in the Oval Office attacked the press for their entertainment. There they were, a herd of yuppie swine in their Bermuda shorts and golf socks, slurping cocktails, unmasked, undistanced, passing the virus, if the world is lucky, only among themselves.
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The pick of Kamala Harris as VP candidate says more about Joe Biden than it really says about Harris. Her qualifications were self-evident and what she brings to the team both in personal and political value, though not to be overlooked, are not really as significant as Biden’s ability to pick a black woman of strength as his running mate. Biden is obviously man enough that a strong woman at his side doesn’t detract from his ability to function.
No sooner was the announcement made than the GOP was out with an ad attacking Biden as “slow” and Harris as “phony”. To their credit they were ready for all contingencies. To their deficit they had nothing to say except childish name-calling. But if they want to play on that field, how about Dumb Donald. Sure it’s petty but at least it’s actually earned. I mean, with the possible exception of George Bush, Trump is the dumbest occupant of the White House in memory and I go back to FDR.
How many presidents can you think of that didn’t know the difference between WWI and WWII and when they started and ended? Okay, maybe George Bush but Dumb Donald is in a class by himself. He always wanted to be the greatest at something. Well, here’s his title; Dumbest President in History.