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August 19, 2010

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Good points Jon. I must admit that the mainstream and cable media have become masters at distracting the masses while truly important events occur elsewhere.

This mosque thing is our latest "Brittany" or "Lindsey" distraction.

No one makes the connection between today's news about higher jobless numbers at the same time the Potash Corp. CEO is set to make $445 million in a merger. Gee??? I don't know??? Is the guy going to use some of that money to make a movie about building a mosque in NY, starring Lindsey Lohan?? Now that would be news that would get the people's attention.

democrats are cowardly and corporate owned. republicans are arrogant and corporate owned.

I am just holding my breath until November. The outcome of this election will show me the following:

Since congress has an approval rating in the teens:


If we re-elect 80+% of incumbents, we are screwed, the end will be coming and I will have given up all hope of us turning this train wreck around.

If we re-elect 50 to 80 percent of incumbents, MAYBE we still have a slim chance of regaining our government.

If we re-elect 50% or less of incumbents, then the message will be strong. After kicking serious butt in DC, we can then go after the so called "American corporations" who have trashed our country in exchange for "this quater's profits".

Sorry about the rant. I'm so pissed that our government thinks it can lie to us so blatantly and expect us to buy it. NOAA coming out and saying "hey there's no more oil in the gulf". I hate it. I hate being lied to.

Since we're all relatively sophisticated creatures here, there's obviously no reason to dust off the pom poms and rip a cheer for the Democratic Party. Still, I think there's a larger problem with party politics in this country. The Democrats - love 'em or whatever - are still a broad-based coalition. You've got unions, greens, minorities, and increasingly, professionals. By contrast, Republicans are a church. Their tenets are white skin, "free" markets, and social grievance. This church is strongly tribal and it sees infidels everywhere. It relishes the Kulturkampf because it has no rational policy aims aside from winning power. It's still crazy after all these years.

This has created a stark disadvantage for Democrats. Rather than blindly rallying around its leaders, Democrats question and backbite. Republicans, on the other hand, jump when Fox says jump. Winning is the only thing that matters to them. They're the football team. We're the nerds in the library.

What this ultimately means is that Democrats are morally bound to make the best of bad situations while Republicans can relish making bad situations even worse. To look at the past two years is to see one party grappling with real-world issues and one party nihilistically blocking any rational debate about those issues. This is a recipe for madness and catastrophe.

I like calling Republicans assholes.

My best-hope scenario for this country is that Republicans self-annihilate through their own cruelty and ugliness. What we desperately need is a rational right in America. We need adults, not buffoons like Ben Quayle prancing about playing tough guys. Granted, the current prognosis is not good. But the disproportionately old and demented Republican cohort will not live forever.

Democrats are paying a price for being the party of complexity, nuance, compromise, and compassion. If we were assholes, we'd have an easier time fighting the Right. I'm half-tempted to go there but I'm not sure it's worth killing my soul over.

Great column Jon. I remember Lee Atwater actually with great respect. At least he could play a damn good electric guitar. Rove can only play...Atwater was a great political fighter. Rove is, as the Dallas Morning News author Wayne Slater put it, bush's brain. Say no more.

Holodomor. That is the future. The policy of the US government is to deliberately starve Americans.

How many Americans will starve before the revolution begins?

Just wait until the mass layoffs start happening before Christmas.

We live in a country with no jobs at all.

The job numbers hit 500k filings again. I thought the economy sucked, but I didn't think we'd hit that level again.

NAFTA, Reaganomics and suicidal trade policies championed by the GOP are where I point the finger.

The GOP wants to crush US wages to a 3rd-world level. They intend to do this. Don't be surprised. The GOP wants massive unemployment.

The High Priest of the False Equivalency, David Broder, had a fairly good column in yesterday's Post. He did his usual pox-on-both-their-houses harrumph. But his closing paragraphs were quite good. It turns out Senator Jon Kyl is deliberately undermining American and global security by holding up ratification of the new strategic arms treaty. Why? Because he wrongly believes inspections of Russian long-range nuclear bases is continuing. The old START treaty lapsed last December.

Savor the irony. Imagine if Michelle Obama took a vacation that did as much damage to American interests as Kyl is currently doing. Imagine more than 1% of Americans knowing or caring about this actual - as opposed to made-up - issue. Do Republicans win by deliberately sabotaging our national interest? I'm not sure what other conclusion any observer could draw.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/18/AR2010081804692.html

2 years before Obama took the reins, January 2006, unemployment 5%, 4.3% inflation and the 2006 budget deficit was barely $2 billion bucks. 2 years after The One took over and 4 years after Congress went to democrat control- 9.5% unemployment, 500 gazillion dollar deficit, foreclosures at record pace, and the entoire private sector is destroyed or owned by The Magnificent One, Big Brother.
How tough a call do you think it is allocating responsibility for this?
Wake up Liberal fools

@strypz1: "the 2006 budget deficit was barely $2 billion bucks"? Thanks for the laugh. Correct answer: $296 billion. Bush's last deficit? $1.3 trillion. Smarter trolls, please.

Here's another interesting viewpoint on the current subject:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/when-wall-street-rules-we_b_688866.html

strypz1, we like to steer clear of name calling on this blog and limit ourselves to civil dialogue and humor where necessary. If you like the name calling thing, you are always welcome to post comments on AZCENTRAL.COM. All they do is rant and rave and call each other names, 24/7.

For the rest of you I have another "theory" of mine. My theory is that the folks in D.C. depend regularly on the rest of us common folks to get "distracted" by the size of the numbers they throw around back there. Since I am not a trained economist, I can provide no educated opinion about whether we should tax more or spend less or vice versa. You've all heard all the arguments.

Here's some simple math from a simple guy: If I could wave a magic wand and return 10,000,000 of the jobs to the US that had been lost over the past few years AND if each job paid $70,000 per year AND if the government taxed those jobs at the rate of 100%, we would only raise enough money to offset 1/2 of the $1.4 trillion deficit. In layman's terms, that sure looks to me like we have "a spending problem".

In the first half of my life, a million dollars was a big deal.

In the second half of my life, a billion dollars was a big deal.

This trillion stuff is scary.

Perhaps one definition of "short term memory loss" would cover the inability to go back 3 years and chart the sea of toxic debt the US banksters had issued. CMO's (collateralized mortgage obligations) were an element. They resembled the shady grocer's old practice of grinding old out of code hamburger in with the good. Nobody really knew what they were getting . . . did they?

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