Bits & Pieces #32

 

 

David Ignatius commentd on Chris Matthew’s show hat Chris Christie would eat Jeb Bush if they ever went head to head in a presidential debate. Why not, Christie already looks like he ate both the Georges and had Barbara for desert.

 

 

****

 

Dick Cheney just won’t shut up. When the hubristic sociopath was asked about what he thought was his biggest fault, he replied that it wasn’t worrying about his faults. Then he went on to state that he’d rather be right than loved. He never considered that be might not be right, that he and his cronies had been horribly wrong and monstrously destructive to their country in most of the decisions that they made over the eight year period when they almost destroyed the USA.

 

 

****

 

Wisconsin’s newby Senator Ron Johnson proved this week that he is as stupid as his crony Ted Cruz and he does it at high volume. It’s one thing to be dumb, but when you’re dumb, fact free and obnoxious about it; that is unforgivable.

 

****

 

George Will misses the point about immigration. He states correctly that illegal Mexican immigration has reached a zero point but he doesn’t concede that we have to make legal immigration easier for those that we want to stay here. Right now the entire immigration system is a mess and we need to encourage those with usable skill to make this country their home.

 

***

If there’s one thing to be said for Rand Paul, it’s that he is for a reduction in government interference in the lives of private citizens. But he’s all over the place on the frighteningly mis-named drone policy, so it’s hard to see where his point is. He carried on, ad nauseum, during his filibuster, over the killing of Americans on US soil by drones. What killings? No US citizens have even been attacked on US soil by drones. If we’re going to waste the Senate’s time, let’s do it over an existing problem. Let’s not create them so we can get face time in TV. This ratty little clown is not James Stewart.

 

Killing American traitors, like Awlaki, who are overseas and actually involved in a war against us is quite another matter. This is a job for the armed forces and by extension the President who is their commander in chief.

 

****

 

Interesting debate between Republican Rob Portman, and Democrat Chris von Holler, on Face the Nation.  It was two intelligent guys, having a civilized discussion, absent lies and gargantuan distortions. Each made his points and while they did not come to an agreed upon conclusion, they gave us hope for the future of bipartisan politics in this country.

 

*****

 

I have the greatest respect for Bob Schefer, for his fearlessness in confronting lies and navigating uncomfortable situations on his program, but this Sunday he cut and ran like a thief when the question of gay priests came up on his show during a discussion between Sally Quinn, Carl Bernstein, Peggy Noonan and Greg Tolen. It seemed awfully hypercritical since they were discussing the congregation of the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope. We’re speaking here, of a group of men, a large percentage of whom are gay, who will vote against gay issues and who currently exist under a cloud of condemnation over their handling of an issue of predominantly gay pedophilia. Come on Bob, get with it.

 

 

*****

 

Once again the GOP and its attack dogs have fallen victim of their own stupidity. First NY Daily News reporter Dan Friedman jokingly posed the question, of what would happen if Friends of Hamas and the Junior League of Hezbollah had given funds to Hagel, to a GOP aide. It seems to have telephoned from that aide across the GOP spectrum resulting in reportage by Fox business host, Lou Dobbs, National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy and AM talk show host, Hugh Hewitt. Each had obviously done a great deal of research on their stories but not enough to discover the one important fact; that the entire story was based on a joke, and that neither organization actually existed. This didn’t keep GOP Senate idiots like Inhofe and Cruz from actually trying to place Hagle as a recipient of Iranian funds based on Friedman’s joke organizations. You gotta wonder who votes for these clowns.

 

****

 

 

The problem with the nuclear industry has always been money. Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest way to create energy. All we have to do to get it, is to spend the money, but no one wants to do that so we have the continual scares that get in its way. The current problem exists at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington where a forty-year-old storage tank is leaking radioactive waste.  This is a single shell container when it should have been a multi-shell container and it is long past its replacement date. Why does it have only a single shell? Why is it still in use past it’s replacement date? Money, the root of all incompetence.

 

The same kind of problem exists with our used nuclear fuel. No one seems to know what to do with it. That’s ridiculous. The technology exists and is currently being used in France, to reburn those fuel rods until there is nothing left of them. We aren’t using that technology here because most of our nuclear plants are obsolete and no one wants to spend the money to replace them with new plants that would include the technology to reburn their fuel until it disappears. The bottom line is, that we can have the most efficient, safest energy in the world but it costs. The question is do we want to be alive or rich. It seems we can’t have both.

 

***

 

“This is not the kind of question you can leave to congress.” That was Justice Antonin Scalia speaking about the Voting Rights Act the other day. He was insinuating that congress made a mistake when it passed one of the most important pieces of legislation since the 13^th Amendment.

 

The ironic thing about his opposition to the Voting Rights Act, is that, although coming from the wrong place, it’s correct. Scalia would like to see it overturned but many would like to see it applied across the entire nation, not just in selected southern states.

 

Shelby County, Alabama, a regular hotbed of social justice, was in court the other day trying to overturn the legislation. Their argument; that the bill was unfair because it targeted only certain states, has a point. At the time the bill was first passed, there was a groundswell of advanced bigotry in the areas named in the bill. Now that groundswell has subsided somewhat in the targeted areas but seems to have moved, like a contagious disease, to new and formerly disease free areas in the north and west. Yes the bill must be looked at; it must in fact be expanded to take in the entire nation. Only then will we be free of the kind of degenerate tactics we saw at the polls, from the GOP and their supporters, in the last election.

 

****

One in every five people on the planet is Muslim. Of the five countries with the largest Muslim populations Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Turkey, none speak Arabic, all have different languages, cultures, races and ethnic groups and none are in the Middle East. India has 164.000,000 Muslims and they are still a minority. China has more Muslims than Iraq. Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined. They all think differently and have different life styles and goals. Does this mean anything to those who are busy attacking all Muslims because a few nuts have attacked us? Most of the world doesn’t hate all Americans just because we spawned Bush and Cheney

 

***

 

I am a firm supporter of No Labels the organization pushing for bipartisan action in congress and standing firm against defacing images of one party or another, but every once in a while reality must rear its ugly head and come to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to keep an open mind to the actions of a certain class of Right Wing hair-brain idiots.  When there are men out there demanding trans-vaginal probes of raped women or when a gay soldier serving in Iraq is booed as happened in the Republican presidential debate or when Gov Perry is cheered for racking up more executions than any other governor, it somehow makes the Right seem less than human just as do the signs that I observed at a Connecticut Tea Party rally before the election that showed pictures of The president with a line through his face and the words “No Niggers.”

 

I understand what No Labels is trying to accomplish and I support it but lines have to be drawn somewhere and for me, it comes just before the acceptance of these degenerates as human beings. I absolutely think that we should be trying to sit down and negotiate fairly and in good faith for the good of the country but I also absolutely know that there are certain standards beneath which we simply cannot sink. The victory is just not worth the cost.

 

***

 

 

There is no short-term debt crisis. Obama added $4 trillion in the last 4 years after Bush added 10 trillion in the previous 8 years and much of Obama’s 4 trillion is the result of Bush’s policies and blundering.

 

Obama has offered $1.2 trillion in cuts and the Republicans gave him $600B in taxes on the rich. That’s not a fair deal. Still the Right isn’t satisfied. Boehner wants to cut spending but he refuses to admit the fact that we have already cut $2.5 trillion from the deficit and that for the first time in 20 years we are actually spending less than we are taking in.

 

If we can just get past all the lies and mis-statements that are being propagated by the right, maybe we can actually get some governing done. Maybe we also can work out a system that will eliminate all these cliffhangers

 

The Budget Control act of 2011 doesn’t deal with entitlements and hurts areas that would help jobs growth so we have to look to get rid of it.

 

The problem is that our government is doing the wrong thing. We have been slipping into austerity when we should be trying to spend to get our 20 million unemployed or underemployed back to earning a real living.  We are laying off government workers when we should be taking advantage of the almost zero interest rates to borrow more and finance projects that would put people back to work.

 

The deficit is not a short-term problem. Unemployment is the short-term problem and if we eliminate it we will have a good part of the solution to the deficit problem, which should not be ignored in the long term.

 

 

*****

Keystone and its supporters continue to fight for their billion dollar boondock, lying and buying all the congressmen they can lay their dollars on, but they can’t be bothered to maintain safe pipelines where they already exist. On March 31^st, 30,000 gallons of Canadian oil were spilled when a train derailed in Minnesota. This gave pipeline advocates an argument for their “safer” means of transporting the oil but then over the weekend, a pipeline burst in Mayflower, Arkansas. The EPA estimated the spill at 84,000 gallons of oil but Exxon has admitted that they have already sucked up 189,000 gallons and that they expect the total to be more than double that number. If these lazy, greedy slobs can’t keep their pipelines safe while they’re trying to prove a point what chance is there for that happening once they have clearance to rape the country?