No wonder northerners think of southerners as being retarded. Down in good ole Kentucky, they have a clown named Tom Riner, a state senator and also a Baptist minister who has managed to get a law on the books that declares it a felony not to publically recognize the claim that God is responsible for our public security. A plaque that displays this ridiculous concept, which states that, “The safety and security of the commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance on almighty God,” must be posted on the state Homeland Security building. Only in the solid south.
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Bill Bradley was talking about this a little while ago and it made so much sense that I knew in my heart that the Republicans would immediately refute it. Take a look for yourself.
Currently the Private Sector non-financial industry has $1.8 trillion on the books that it won’t spend because it, understandably, has no demand for product.
If 20% of that money were used to hire people it would drop the unemployment rate to 5% but CEOs say they won’t make the necessary investments to create those jobs because of uncertainty and no demand. Reasonable.
How do you solve these problems? Well you attack uncertainty by deficit reduction and lack of demand by a massive injection of stimulus money aimed at infrastructure. The government can do this by guaranteeing industry that it will pay 30% of the cost of each laborer so long as that laborer is not laid off during a specific time frame. The government would set aside $50B for such a program but no government money will be at risk until after a worker is hired. When you figure the 30% the government is laying out as its share of each worker’s salary against the cost of unemployment benefits, food stamps and other care, the taxpayer would end up on the plus side of the ledger and in addition you would have a person working for 2/3rds more than they would be making on welfare or unemployment and buying goods that would encourage other manufacturers to get into the race and enable the workers to pay more taxes.
Of course the place to start this program is in infrastructure where there is no need for individual product demand but only a need for upgrade.
I know this is simple, logical and easy to understand which is probably why the likes of Mitch McConnell and John Ryan will be against it.
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Everyone including me has been busy attacking the Koch brothers for the fund-raising they are doing to defeat Obama, but the Koch’s are doing nothing illegal. They are simply taking advantage of a situation set up by our crippled Supreme Court.
What is not illegal, however, is definitely unethical and here is why I say that. At a Heritage fundraiser, in the not too distant past, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the featured speaker. The Heritage Society is not only a beneficiary of the Koch money but a partner in raising it. Thomas, by appearing there was creating one of the most unethical conflicts of interest imaginable since he was one of the reasons that the Citizens United decision went as it did in the Court.
Of course this would never occur to Thomas who has been in the center of innumerable situations where he should have recused himself from deliberation but didn’t. If the Court were still paying attention to ethical considerations, which they obviously are not, they would, long ago, have censured Thomas for his unethical behavior. He has been a disaster ever since he was appointed.
The short sighted policies of the Koch’s, looking only for political victory and the power to king make, will eventually, if they are successful, destroy democracy in this country and turn the USA into a third world, oligarch run, dictatorship that can lead to nothing but rebellion. We will have become Libya with an American accent and more guns.
But let’s be clear, Republican Super Pacs are not a whole hell of a lot worse than Democratic Super Pacs, or even a bunch of rich liberals getting together at a NYC ballroom to shell out forty grand a head to press the flesh with the Pres. All of that money could find a much better place to be spent than on advertising for election campaigns.
So how do we stop it and how do we replace the process with one that is fairer and less wasteful? Well, congress can always pass a law restricting or eliminating the whole process and substituting taxpayer’s money. That would be the easiest way but expecting the gutless bunch of punks that make up congress, to vote against their own ability to raise campaign money from which they can shake free a few bucks for their own personal needs is like expecting a pig to fly.
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Watched Grover Norquist on 60 Minutes. He is a slimy devil and ultimately the height of dishonesty. If you’re going to do something, at least have the stones to take the blame. This scurve has successfully blackmailed over half of congress into signing his fiscally destructive pledge to never raise any kind of taxes. When confronted with this, and with the fact of his success, which has made him one of the most powerful men in the country, he smiles ingenuously, and tries to sell the bigger lie, that it’s really the voters who have the power to cost anyone who breaks the pledge, their jobs. He cannot manage to lose his supercilious grin, however, and that’s what gives his lie away.
I think it’s time for the voters to turn his lying statement into truth. It’s time for the voters to vote out of office any congressman who doesn’t refute this twenty-year-old obstruction to good government. Norquist’s whole program is simply an act of fealty to his rich sponsors. This guy has done and is doing more to damage this country than anyone since Joe McCarthy.
His moronic idea as expressed on 60 Minutes is to shrink the Government back to 8% of GDP, right where it was at the end of the 19th Century when there were no paved roads, smaller railroads, no electric grid, no communications as we know them, a tiny military and no concept or need for national security, when our biggest foe was a bunch of pirates in the Mediterranean. Even then, though, it wasn’t national security that sent us to war with the Barbary pirates but the needs of our industrialists to keep the trade routes open and safe. But that’s his concept of the world, an 19th century fiefdom where the rich rule as they did then and the rest of us are not much more than the slaves we had freed forty years before. It would be a wonderful land for Grover, one where he could scurry around as the favored toady of one of his billionaire sponsors.
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One of the proudest moments in our history was when the first George Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990. Now twenty-two years later Republicans in the House have voted against our country backing the rest of the world through a UN resolution that would extend what we have already done, to other countries around the world. What the hell is wrong with these clowns? Don’t they see that their actions are what make the rest of us disgusted with the far Right Wing in congress?
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Watched James Baker on Fareed talking about what he thinks the Republican party needs to do to return to power but all the things he thinks they should do are exactly the things they fought against and what made them lose the election. He thinks that Republicans should seek the Latino vote but how can they do this when they want to throw all the Latinos out of the country? He thinks they should seek the women’s vote but that impossible when they allow their fanatic Christians to act like Muslims toward women, forcing them into second citizen roles and invading their personal privacy. He thinks that the right should have an education policy but huge parts of the party, don’t believe in science, hate intellectuals and thinks heir children should be home schooled by people who often have no more education then the kids.
Baker’s right in what he wants, the problem is that he wants it from a party that has fought against it with all its might. Maybe he should be a Democrat.
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Watched Michigan, State Senator Gretchen Whitmer slam the Republicans, in that body, over their support of right to work legislation. This is a woman with enormous stones, a terrific speaker and someone who should go far in the party.
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The government is about to sell off the last of the AIG stock that it acquired in Stimulus Program. Surprise, surprise, it will create a multi-billion dollar profit for Uncle Sam. How the hell did that happen? Could it be that the Republicans who screamed socialism when the Stimulus deals were set up were wrong… just like they were wrong about everything else that had anything to do with the economy. Oooops!
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Boy, they just keep coming out of the swamp. An Orange County California Superior Court Judge, Derek Johnson has publicly stated that if a woman doesn’t show signs of resistance, (mutilated vagina, bruises, broken bones, cuts, etc.) then she wasn’t raped because the” body shuts down and prevents penetration.”
Where do they get these morons and who either appoints them or elects them?
This all came out of a case where a woman was threatened with atrocious violence by a boyfriend and submitted out of real fear. How does a man as stupid, bigoted and ultimately dangerous as Johnson get in the position he occupies? It’s a disgrace to the system and he should immediately be pulled from the bench and put in a cell with a couple of big overly friendly inmates. Let him lean about rape firsthand.