Fresno California Liberal

2010-02-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

CONSERVATIVES DO SMUG WELL

Sometimes I think reading the letters to the editor in The Fresno Bee is a little sado-masochistic. It's a page dominated by right-wing "commentators," who don't offer much in the way of real discussion. What conservatives do very well is to be smug and self-serving.

Remember when George W. Bush stole the White House and we were told the "grown ups" were in charge? Bush and company proceeded to lie us into two wars, assault civil liberties, and wreck the economy. Yesterday's Bee had another right-wing letter saying that right-wing kooks should just "laugh" at liberals. It would be easy to laugh at conservatives when you consider their general lunacy. People who flock to a nitwit like Sarah Palin don't deserve much respect.

But when you look at the horror wrought by conservatives on this country and the rest of the world you realize it's no laughing matter.

2010-01-24T11:36:00.000-08:00

IN THE RIGHT WING WORLD OF MYTH

The Fresno Bee published a letter from a right-winger today talking about the election of centerfold model Scott Brown as the interim Senator from Massachusetts. The writer called the Obama administration "far left." It's just amazing how stupid these people are.

Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan. If you notice, we're also still in Iraq. Many of the Bush policies that subvert civil liberties are still in place. Most of the stimulus package went to big banks and corporations. How is any of that "far left"?

I think the major message of the Massachusetts election is that President Obama has governed too much from the right. We need a government that represents the majority of us and that simply isn't happening. The latest horror from the Supreme Court just emphasizes the point that the rich and powerful run the show in this country.

I still think President Obama is far better than the alternative, but I'd like to see his administration push a progressive agenda. Stop worrying about bipartisanship with the thugs in the Republican party and pursue the agenda that got him elected.

2009-12-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

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MAIL FROM RUBBER STAMP RADANOVICH

I have the misfortune to live in the district "served" by Congressman George Radanovich, a reactionary Republican.

Today I got a mailing from Radanovich that was in high dudgeon about the federal deficit. Mr. Radanovich wasn't nearly as concerned about the deficit back in the days of "W" and the massive deficits he created with his transfers of wealth to the risk. Honesty is a hard quality for Republicans to come by.

2009-10-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

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BUSH'S DAYS OF INFAMY

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously called December 7, 1941, "a day that will live in infamy." But George W. Bush and his gang of criminal confederates contributed several days of infamy to our history.

The Supreme Court created the first day of infamy when they used twisted and fallacious reasoning to hand the presidency to Bush, who lost the popular vote, and who undoubtedly lost the vote in the pivotal state of Florida.

The second day of infamy was when Bush was sworn in as President. Bush stood there on that day and swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He spent the next eight years doing exactly the opposite.

A third day of infamy was September 11, 2001, when, due to the Bush administration's abject incompetence, terrorists launched successful attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, D. C.

The fourth day of infamy was when an attack was launched on Iraq, a country that was no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11.

Robert Parry takes a look at the day Bush was sworn in as president and how the major media ignored the outrage felt by so many Americans. This excerpt is at www.consortiumnews.com:

But other Americans believed January 20, 2001, was a day of infamy for the American Republic. It was the first time in 112 years that a popular-vote loser was to be installed as President of the United States – and then only after he engineered an unprecedented intervention by political allies on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Five Republican justices had stopped the vote count in the swing state of Florida, where Bush’s brother, Jeb, was governor and other Bush loyalists oversaw the election, which then was awarded to Bush by 537 votes out of six million ballots cast.

So, on that cold January day, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Washington, D.C., shouting angry slogans and waving handwritten anti-Bush signs.

The protesters were convinced that Bush had stolen the presidential election and, in so doing, had disenfranchised the plurality of citizens who had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore.

Some signs were addressed directly to Bush. “You’re not my President,” read one. “I know you lost,” said another. One sign had just two large letters, “NO.” To these Americans, Bush’s ascension to the nation’s highest office was a travesty of democracy.

Where we stood, the protesters, many in dark-colored parkas and ski or baseball caps, outnumbered the elegantly attired Republicans.

2009-09-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

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CONSERVATIVES ARE TERMINALLY STUPID

Sometimes when I read a letter in The Fresno Bee I have to wonder if it's tongue in cheek. But right-wingers are so stupid you usually just believe the letter is real.

Today's example was a guy on a rant about Nazis and socialism. His argument is that Nazis were called "National Socialists." Therefore, they have to be socialists. If you consult political scientists, the people who know about these things, you will find that Nazis were fascists. Fascists are on the far political right, as far removed from socialists as you can get.

Communist East Germany called itself the German Democratic Republic Because they used the word "Democratic" does that mean they were a democracy? Of course not.

We should remember that Germany attacked the Soviet Union, who this guy would probably call socialist. Conservatives have an incredible talent for jamming personal attacks, stupidity, ignorance, and outright lies into very limited space.

2009-08-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

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THE WEIRD RIGHT WING WORLD

I'm watching the coverage of Senator Edward Kennedy's funeral and there is great sadness. The sadness is over the loss of Senator Kennedy, over the loss of JFK and RFK all those years ago, the loss of other great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. We don't have leaders of that caliber or that vision left. Edward Kennedy was the torch that still burned and now his life has been extinguished.

The Fresno Bee prints snippets of letters to give you an idea of the content. Lately, when I see the usual frothing of right-wing freaks I don't bother to read the rest. Today's sampling included the assertion that liberals think we have all the answers. No, we don't. If we did, the world would be far better than it is. The hateful right-wing philosophy of greed, exploitation, bigotry, war, and hate would be shoved to the back of the closet. But right-wing influence is everywhere in the media.

For right-wingers there is never enough prejudice, never enough inequality, never enough death and destruction. It's like a narcotic for them.

I hope that we not only have leaders like JFK, RFK, and Edward Kennedy, but that we collectively become like them. That is when things will truly change.

2009-08-23T05:22:00.000-07:00

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THE RIGHT-WING ASSAULT ON ALL OF US

Maybe we need a new social science that combines aspects of political science, sociology, and psychology to analyze the behavior of the right wing in this country. It's a movement mostly moved by hate and paranoia. It's all emotion and no reason. Most of the knuckle draggers who fulminate against things like "socialized medicine" have no idea of what they're talking about. They've heard the talking points from the thugs who manipulate them, people like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Gingrich, and Palin. They repeat those talking points endlessly. They talk about "freedom" while they busily go about denying freedom to their fellow citizens by threat and intimidation.

If we don't get national health care, it will be a national tragedy. We should have had national health care decades ago. But just as the vestiges of slavery endured for one hundred years after the Civil War--and still endures in many ways--we continue with the same broken and heartless system. Other countries have successfully implemented health care for their citizens but we, the "can do" country, can't do it because of the cruel and selfish ideologues on the political right. This editorial from The New York Times summarizes it well from www.nytimes.com:

If nothing is done to slow current trends, the number of people in this country without insurance or with inadequate coverage will continue to spiral upward. That would be a personal tragedy for many and a moral disgrace for the nation. It is also by no means cost-free. Any nation as rich as ours ought to guarantee health coverage for all of its residents.

2009-08-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

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RIGHT WING WRECKAGE

It's ironic when you think about it. The traditional idea of conservatism is to conserve, to be cautious. What gets called "conservative" now is about destruction: destruction of the economy, destruction of the environment, destruction of civil liberties. It comes straight out of Orwell's 1984. The people who shout "freedom" are the destroyers of freedom.

Shakespeare described conservatives well when he wrote in A Midsummer's Night Dream: "The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion."

My prevailing mood these days is weariness. I have a job I absolutely loathe and can't leave because of the economic disaster left by the Bush administration. Hopes for universal health care, which this country desperately needs, appear to be dimming. The war in Afghanistan is actually escalating. News on the environmental front is constantly depressing. It seems the human race is determined to destroy our own planet. The "jaws of darkness" do indeed "devour it up."

2009-08-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

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REVERSE MIGRATION

A good friend is moving from California back to Texas this weekend. After years of working at a miserable job that we both hate, she has had enough. She and her husband are going back to Houston. Right-wingers always make it sound so simple. If you don't like your job, whatever, just quit. The problem is you need to find some income somewhere. The jobs aren't here now. Fresno has a miserable economy even in good national economic times. Thanks to Bush at the national level and a series of right-wing policies in this state, the economy lies in shambles. The Golden State has turned into lead.

This commentary by Marc Cooper is at www.thenation.com:

Aggravating matters, Governor Schwarzenegger took an intractable "no new taxes" position and then went a step further, saying the crisis was an opportunity to make "structural reforms." Translation: the governor demanded radical shrinkage of the public sector, including virtual abolition of CalWorks, the state welfare program, and a rollback of state employee pensions. He even threatened the "nuclear option": suspension of Prop 98, which requires that 40 percent of state revenues be channeled into schools. Four years ago, when Schwarzenegger attempted to impose a similar far-reaching conservative agenda through a set of referendums, he was mightily slapped down by voters and forced to apologize. Now, it seemed, he was trying to hold the state hostage to these draconian changes as the price of a budget deal. "He just got it in his head that his time is up and his legacy must be long-term reform," said Bebitch Jeffe. "So he's using the short-term budget as leverage. Either he doesn't understand, or he's taking a mammoth risk."

"Some of the cuts proposed by the governor are unimaginable," said Barbara O'Connor, political analyst at Cal State, Sacramento, a few days before the budget deal was reached. "In the end," she predicted, "it will be declared a win-win. No one will love it. Everyone will accept it."

Maybe. Because in the end, while Schwarzenegger was proposing Armageddon, the Democrats settled for mere catastrophe. When the budget details were unveiled, it was like viewing the emaciated corpse of a once great state. There are no new taxes. But hammer blows hit the poor, the elderly, the infirm and students and will keep them staggering for years. The deal called for almost $8 billion to be taken from education; more than $1 billion from state worker pay; an equal amount from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program; $375 million from CalWorks; $226 million from home healthcare, in which patients and caregivers will now have to be fingerprinted; $124 million from Healthy Families health insurance, which means thousands of children will be wait-listed for coverage; and more than $4 billion confiscated from local governments, which will create a ripple effect of collateral damage. The proposed taxes on oil extraction, tobacco sales and vehicle registration were penciled out; the budget was balanced only through a set of accounting gimmicks, which merely kicked the crisis down the road a few months. The only winners in this deal were felons, who won a $1.2 billion cut in prison funding, which would reduce the prison population by some 27,000.

2009-07-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

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GO AWAY, PALIN, GO AWAY

Sarah Palin, last year's GOP vice-presidential candidate and current Alaska governor, announced she will step down as governor. She did not disclose her future plans. There is speculation she will pursue the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. There is other speculation that a myriad of ethics complaints prompted her resignation, and that possible more scandals are to come. In any event, I hope Palin just goes far, far away. Right-wing extremists like Palin have left ruin their wake. You only wish that our version of "governor" in California would also step down. His ineptitude, which has reached epic proportions, has left the state in a miserable condition. This commentary by Gail Collins is at www.nytimes.com:

Last year's GOP vice-presidential candidate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Sarah Barracuda made her big announcement Friday afternoon on the lawn of her home to an audience that appeared to include only Todd, the kids and the next-door neighbors. Smiling manically, she looked like a parody of the woman who knocked the Republicans dead at their convention. She babbled about her parents’ refrigerator magnet, which apparently had a lot of wise advice. And she recalled her visit with the troops in Kosovo, whose dedication and determination inspired her to ... resign.

“Life is about choices!” declared the nation’s most anti-choice politician.

People, what is going on with governors in this country? Are we doomed to see them go bonkers one by one, state by state? announced her resignation. There is speculation Palin will make a run for the presidency in 2012. There is other speculation that a myriad of ethics scandals, with possible more scandals to come, caused her to step down. In any event, I hope Palin just goes far, far away. I don't think she would be a good candidate for president, but I'm just tired of right-wing extremists and Palin is about as extremist as they come. I wish our version of governor here in California would step down. His ineptitude has reached epic proportions and the damage he has done to the state will take a very long time to repair. This commentary by
Gail Collins is at www.nytimes.com:

2009-06-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

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RIGHT WING: NOTHING BUT HATE

Right-wing philosophy is a cancer on this country. Right-wingers have impeded social progress at every turn. They tried to derail the New Deal and positive reforms such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, banking regulation, and a basic safety net for the majority of us. They fought tooth and nail against civil rights legislation. They have blocked attempts at regulating gun ownership and we see the carnage constantly from any nut getting easy access to a gun to kill lots and lots of people. They cling to a superstitious religious belief that should have gone the way of bleeding with leeches. In this column Tim Rutten looks at the wave of hate crimes committed by right-wing cretins The column is at www.latimes.com:

The United States' extreme right wing inhabits a shadow world, and the delusional nature of its core beliefs -- anti-Semitism, white supremacy and a rat's nest of economic and constitutional conspiracy theories -- makes tracing causality within its ranks a dicey proposition. Still, it's clear that something is stirring this peculiarly American cesspool in ways that haven't occurred since the mid-1990s, when an upsurge in activity among so-called militia groups culminated in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the deadliest terrorist incident on American soil until 9/11.

Rumors that the new Obama administration secretly planned to seize people's firearms surged through the Internet, which nowadays links extremists like a kind of fevered nervous system, and fueled a run on gun stores that stock assault weapons. In April, incidents of violence began to crop up: Three Pittsburgh police officers were killed by a 23-year-old man who feared his guns were about to be seized. The alleged killer frequented white-supremacist websites and frequently railed to his friends about "Jewish control" of the banks and media. Shortly afterward, a Florida National Guard soldier shot two deputy sheriffs to death, allegedly because he was "severely disturbed" by Obama's election. He too was a frequent reader of far-right-wing websites.

2009-05-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

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DARTH CHENEY AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR

Darth Cheney emerged from his crypt and, amazingly, didn't burst into flame when exposed to sunlight. Cheney wants to give us a revised history of the deplorable Bush administration and he wants to defend the policies he and Bush inflicted on the country and the world. The media have become mostly stenographers, repeating whatever powerful politicians say, but without any analysis or background. So we don't hear torture called torture, but "enhanced interrogation" techniques. We're told the Bush administration kept us safe, but it was their dereliction of duty that allowed 9/11 to occur in the first place. And attacks have continued around the world. The unnecessary and immoral war in Iraq has drained our resources, cost innocent lives, and magnified the terrorist threat by making us more hated around the world. Frank Rich talks about Darth Cheney and gasbags like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh in this column linked at www.commondreams.org:

Cheney's "no middle ground" speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama's planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery - graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. "daisy" ad of 1964) in the other.

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama's watch. "No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do," Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama's "half measures" were leaving Americans "half exposed." The new president, he said, is unraveling "the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11." In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama's fault. A new ad shouting "We told you so!" awaits only the updated video.

The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party - Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney - have variously cemented the G.O.P.'s brand as a whites-only men's club by revoking Colin Powell's membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a "reverse racist." Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama's. The only card left to play is 9/11.

2009-05-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

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CALIFORNIA: STATE OF CONTRADICTIONS

My family moved to California in the 1960's and back then California truly was the Golden State. We had wonderful infrastructure, a great economy, and good schools. That was in the era of Governor Pat Brown. Since then, we've had a number of bad Republican governors starting with Ronald Reagan on up to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We had the passage of Proposition 13, a right-wing initiative that has made it almost impossible to do anything fiscally responsible. The right-wing Republican minority is able to block almost anything it wants to block. So much for democracy.

California is where we have liberal San Francisco and the push for gay rights. It's also the home of the John Birch Society. California had the hippies in the 1960's, but Sacramento is where Rush Limbaugh got his start. California, derided by gasbags like Limbaugh as the "Left Coast," sent right-wingers like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House. California, a leader in high tech industries, has also depended heavily on poor farm workers, often illegal immigrants, to maintain the agricultural industry In this column Paul Krugman talks about the horror of the federal government copying California in letting reactionary minorities derail meaningful change. The column is at www.nytimes.com:

What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.

Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.

The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.

2009-05-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

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GOP'S DISTRACTIONS ON TORTURE

The method magicians use to perform their tricks is to distract. You focus on something the magician wants you to focus on so he can create his illusion. And so it is with the right wing's distractions on torture. From what you hear in the media, you would think Nancy Pelosi orchestrated this entire reprehensible program. If Nancy Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it, that is disgusting. But the people who conceived using torture and put torture into operation are far more disgusting and far more legally liable. This commentary by Gregg Levine is at www.firedoglake.com:

Because before you get to Pelosi, or to Graham, or Jane Harman, or a host of other congressional leaders who in good time should be held accountable for their action or inaction during the Bush years—before you get to any of that—one thing had to happen. . . .

Someone had to order the torture. Someone had to sign off on the program in its design phase, someone had to render a group of detainees, hold them outside the reach of US law, and someone had to give the order to have them tortured.

I could, at this point, throw out the name George W. Bush—he was president at the time, after all—but we now have pretty good evidence that the real authority for waterboarding (to name but the most talked about of many illegally brutal “techniques”), the real orders to “do that,” and “do that again,” came from the vice president. The order to torture came from Dick Cheney.

Let me say that again: Dick Cheney ordered torture.

Not Nancy Pelosi; Dick Cheney.

Before there were any briefings of any Democrats, there was the torture—a violation in-and-of itself—and that torture was ordered by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.

And to take it one step further, that torture wasn’t ordered up to save us from some imagined “ticking bomb” scenario (not that torture would even solve that particular problem, and not that, even if it did, it could be justified), it was ordered to make detainees produce a specific, desired piece of information (or disinformation). Dick Cheney wanted a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein, and so Cheney told interrogators contractors to torture detainees until they stated that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

2009-05-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

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GOP: DISGUSTING AND OUT OF TOUCH

Right-wingers like to talk about "principles." Using the words "principle" and "Republican" in the same sentence is enough to make you gag. Now Republicans are suddenly deficit hawks, although they gave George W. Bush free reign to bankrupt the country. People who brayed about the "rule of law" during the Clinton administration had no problem with the Bush administration consistently breaking the law by authorizing the repugnant torture of detainees in the "War on Terror." People who are supposedly "strict constructionists" on the Constitution supported a guy who called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper" as he illegally spied on Americans and deprived people of their rights. Their economic policies would be a total joke if not for the absolute disaster they've created. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:

The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.

The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.

2009-04-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

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THE TORTURE-IRAQ CONNECTION

Release of the Bush administration's memos justifying "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding has provoked considerable chatter among the pundit and political class. Right-wingers make the astonishing claim that releasing the memos has endangered U. S. national security. We hear the argument that it would be just a terrible precedent to prosecute officials from previous administrations for acting in "good faith" to protect the country. What they're saying is that criminals, if they're high enough in the government, should get a free pass.

Torture is contrary to everything we're supposed to represent. When we torture it takes away any credibility we have in arguing for human rights in repressive regimes around the world. It means that our enemies can torture and we really can't say much about it. The fact that torture does not elicit reliable information is another point, but certainly not the most important argument. In this commentary Frank Rich points out that the Bush administration was far less interested in protecting the country than in finding some justification for their filthy war in Iraq. The column is at www.nytimes.com:

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

2009-04-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

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CALIFORNIA'S ANTI-WORKER EDD

Think you have a social safety net if you lose your job in California? It's not necessarily so. Even if you should easily qualify for unemployment benefits, it becomes an onerous process to get the benefits. California's Employment Development Department in recent years has become decidedly anti-worker.

For instance, say that you begin some kind of job training. That can disqualify you for unemployment benefits. If you sign on the wrong line and say that you are starting training, you have to stay home for an "interview" by someone from EDD.

Even initial filing can be be a miserable process. If you try to call on the phone, you will most likely get a recorded message stating that EDD is too busy. They then summarily hang up on you.

If you weren't laid off, but lost your job for some other reason, you have to stay home for an "interview." They can find a myriad number of reasons to "interview" you these days, it seems, to try to disqualify you from unemployment.

It's not that unemployment is much of a safety net anyway. Most people would have a very difficult time surviving on unemployment for very long. I know the right-wing argument is that people have to get "incentives" to work, but what if there are no jobs?

Another thing that really irritates me about EDD is that they plaster your full Social Security number on forms. In an age where identity theft is a major problem, and Social Security numbers are a major part of identity theft, that seems highly irresponsible.

It's also mystifying that in age of the Internet that you can't file "continuing claim" forms online. You have to deal with a paper form (assuming they aren't holding that for an "interview.") You can file taxes online, pay bills online, renew your car registration online, so why can't you file continuing unemployment claims online?

Once we get rid of our current incompetent Republican governor I hope that EDD will undergo some reforms to make it sensitive to the needs of the unemployed.

2009-04-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

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WORKER SOLIDARITY

Merle Haggard recorded a song called "The Workin' Man Can't Get Nowhere Today," and that's truer now than when Hag recorded it. With right wing dominance in the political and corporate culture there has been an assault on working people since Ronald Reagan strode into the White House in 1981. While the rich and their lackeys have done very well, wages and benefits for working people have stagnated or actually declined. Now, after the corrupt and incompetent administration of George W. Bush, we see the bitter fruits of right wing policies in their full hideous display.

Martin Luther King was killed 41 years ago. Martin Luther King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to lend support to striking sanitation workers. We can acknowledge and support Doctor King's legacy by standing up for working people once again. This commentary by Robyn E. Blumner is at www.commondreams.org:

One of the great labor speeches in American history is King's 1961 address to the AFL-CIO. In it King reflected on the grand work of the labor movement. He said that in response to the "organized misery" of sweatshops and the notion that capital may "act without restraints and without conscience," the worker unionized and by doing so had "constructed the means by which a fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him."

How sad that in the intervening years King's message to workers has been lost. Worker solidarity has given way to an every-man-for-himself ethic that has helped to strip labor of the influence it once had.

No surprise then that America's prosperity over the last 30 years has not been shared with the workers who created it, with essentially all of its rewards flowing to those at the top. Workers are no longer at the table when the pie gets divided, so they get the crumbs.

It seems the American worker has just been waiting around for, as King put it, "charitable impulses to grow in his employer."

Well, they haven't.

2009-04-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

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SICK OF WINGNUTS

The wingnuts who write letters to the editor of The Fresno Bee are putting their ignorance, bigotry, and callousness on full display since Barack Obama became president. There's nothing new, of course. It's the same old tripe about "socialism" or other paranoid delusions. Today we had a repeat of the McCain campaign meme mocking Obama as "the anointed one." That's a little odd when many on the right claimed that George W. Bush was installed by God. I don't remember any pronouncements from the Deity, but maybe I just missed it.

Fresno is such a hole anyway. We have incredibly high poverty and incredibly high social dysfunction. A part of that, I'm convinced, is because we have more wingnuts per capita than almost any other place in the country. It's time for these right-wing cretins to crawl under their rocks and molder away.

2009-03-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

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STORY OF AN INSPECTION COMPANY

Some names have been changed in this account.

"Abandon hope all you who enter here." Dante

1. SOME BACKGROUND

Anonymous Inspections is an insurance property inspections company located in Fresno, California. Anonymous is right across the street from a church. A major shopping mall is up the street. The area is the frequent target of graffiti vandals and homeless people sleep outside the buildings at night.

I spent almost seven years making my way into the Anonymous parking lot and parking under the big trees at the back of the parking lot. I especially liked the trees in the summer because I took my breaks and lunch in my car. The trees made it a little cooler. It was a brief haven from the office.

The building itself is a rather dingy affair with stained carpets and leaky ceilings. The manager's office is surrounded by glass and reminds me of an aquarium without the water. There is another office located behind the manager's office that contains the computer server in a small room and a larger room where the IT staff sits.

The break room at the front of the building contains cheap plastic chairs, a refrigerator (with frequent complaints about the dirty refrigerator), tables, a microwave oven, and a time clock. There is a sign over the sink ordering people to wash their dishes (which gets ignored much of the time). On the other side is the "training room" and in front of the training room is another office where the payroll clerk works.

The biggest room holds the reviewing staff . The area is divided into cubicles where reviewers sit hunched over their keyboards peering at computer monitors displaying photos of lifting roofs, peeling paint, cracked sidewalks, and other conditions that insurance companies consider problems.

I spent most of my time in Anonymous in a cubicle trying to desperately keep up my "numbers" and avoid any major mistakes on inspection reports.

2. THE OWNER

On its website Anonymous proudly calls itself a family owned business. You have this image of a Mom and Pop place that is something like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone. The reality is closer to the Corleone family in The Godfather.

Anonymous's principal owner is the Matriarch (a. k. a. The Mother). I saw The Matriarch just a handful of times in my seven years. She would come around at Christmas and, to my surprise, even gave us small Christmas bonuses a few times. She would bring her dogs into the office, pushing them in baby strollers.

She drove a Jaguar and we got to see pictures of her big houses at Bass Lake and on the coast.

Her own grandson once allegedly told her of the misery felt by her employees. He said Anonymous's employees were trapped and underpaid. She reportedly responded that Anonymous's employees were overpaid at $9.00 or $10.00 an hour.

For the most part, The Matriarch was content to collect big checks and leave the actual management of the company to family members.

3. HOLY MANAGEMENT CHANGE, BATMAN!

The Matriarch's two sons managed the company until just after Thanksgiving, 2007. They abruptly resigned and we heard innuendos of unethical conduct.

The Matriarch brought in the management team of The Christian and The Optimist, who had moved down from northern California. The Christian is The Matriarch's daughter. We were told that The Optimist had a background in banking and that The Christian had previously run an inspection company.

The first few weeks we got a public relations campaign. Even The Matriarch made appearances in the office. The Christian would come around and greet us in the morning. We were offered gift cards as incentives for more productivity. I even won a few.

As the year wore on, though, things changed. There were no more visits to ask us how we were. There were no more gift cards. We were mandated a stricter dress code, even though we rarely had public contact. Even when the air conditioning made it as icy as the tundra, we couldn't wear jackets that weren't part of the dress code.

We were instructed to send a daily email that detailed our day. We were supposed to find something positive to talk about.

We got word from the IT guy that he monitored the websites we visited. He took great offense that some people had visited sites like My Space or Face Book. We also learned that management read our emails.

The Christian and The Optimist team decided they wanted to move into commercial inspections and I was a candidate to "review" those reports. I had some slight interest at first. But when they started talking about out-of-town trips I wasn't as enthused. I have a hard time physically riding in a car for several hours. The Optimist, in particular, seemed perturbed that I couldn't make long road trips.

A friend was interested in learning commercial reports because she thought the knowledge would give her a leg up on becoming an insurance underwriter. But she suddenly had reports dumped on her without any real training. The Christian reportedly didn't like my friend's criticisms of the often shabby work by field inspectors.

4. MICROMANAGEMENT

The more I was exposed to reviewing the more I became convinced that the greatest qualification is the self discipline not to take an automatic weapon to work.

A perfect report has the photos the insurance company wants arranged in the correct order (front, rear, left side, right side, all around the town), a diagram that looks like the home, square footage that coincides with the tax report information, and notes from the inspector about any problems or questions the insurance company might have. Perfect reports happen about as often as blizzards in Fresno in July.

Inspectors have an uncanny ability to ignore written instructions. For example, suppose there is a written instruction that photos of all outbuildings are required. You can bet that the inspector will say there are outbuildings, but not send any photos. Sometimes getting what you need from an inspector is a little like greyhounds at a dog track chasing a mechanical rabbit round and round and round.

Under the The Christian-Optimist regime there were rules. And more rules. We were told we had to contact the inspectors by email and by phone and by cell phone. They apparently didn't think about smoke signals, jungle drums, or homing pigeons. We had to document our contacts in the "Activity Log." We had to document our contacts on a separate list that we sent them every day. After a while, it felt like I was documenting my documenting.

We were given big binders that contained the guidelines for every account. We were told that we had to keep the binders open at all times. I don't know; maybe we were supposed to learn the guidelines by osmosis.

The word "diagram" has taken on a negative connotation for me now. It's the single biggest headache in the reviewing process.

The Christian-Optimist regime decided it would be a nifty idea to include camera icons on the diagram. The idea is show the angle from where a photo is taken. I should explain that diagrams are already an enormous headache. Inspectors leave off porches, decks, second levels, outbuildings, balconies, bay windows, etc. on diagrams. The objective, from the reviewing standpoint, is to have the diagram look like the house in the photos and to match the desired square footage. Camera icons were just one more monkey wrench in the process.

Camera icons took on a surrealistic aspect when were told we had to include camera icons for condition photos. Say, for example, an inspector takes a photo of peeling paint on the siding. Unless you're psychic, you don't have clue where that damage is unless the inspector tells you. What do you think the odds are that the inspector will tell you?

5. NUMBERS

In this context we're not talking about Arabic numerals or Roman numerals or a television show on CBS on Friday night. Management was very big on "numbers," which equates to the number of reports you complete every day. You track every second of your day so that you can arrive at an hourly average. When you got really bad reports (which is frequent), or you had really complicated reports, your "numbers" would go in the tank.

This was important because "numbers" were the basis for your raise, such as it was. So it was the classic case of a double bind. You had to have error free reports and you had to produce "numbers." Trying to do both was a little like doing jumping jacks on a high wire. I sometimes thought that we should get a handicap like golfers get. If you got reports from some inspectors, you would automatically qualify for a handicap.

Photos, or lack of photos, were a big obstacle in achieving "numbers." If you got reports without photos, or if you got photos that were almost unusable because they were too dark or too light or taken at a weird angle, that greatly affected your "numbers." We would either spend time trying to get photos (documenting in the Activity Log as explained above), fix photos, or get someone else to fix the photos (documenting in the Activity Log as explained above).

"Numbers" became especially important around billing time. We would get emails telling us that we had posted "X" number of reports up to that point. It was supposed to motivate us.

6. HOW TO CO-OPT

The Christian and The Optimist suggested once that I could be a supervisor. I said I wasn't interested. I've been a supervisor. I consider it a no-win position. You can't please management and you can't please the people you supervise. You frequently get put on salary, which means you don't even get paid overtime. And overtime was very important in the The Christian-Optimist regime.

I wasn't a big fan of overtime at Anonymous. It's reminds me of a scene from the movie The Little Shoppe of Horrors. A guy is having his tooth drilled by a dentist. He doesn't use Novocain. He enjoys pain and tells the dentist "My God! Don't stop now!" Unlike that man, I don't enjoy pain. Reviewing for 40 hours was enough pain (see above regarding Activity Log, inspectors, diagrams).

Team Christian-Optimist tried another innovation. They designated people as "account managers." An account manager was in charge of a specific account or accounts and would usually have two or three members of a "team" ( we didn't get pennants or cheerleaders, unfortunately) assigned to work on that account. As things evolved, the chief function of the account managers was to harass members of their "team."

One of the classic strategies of warfare is to divide and conquer. In the business world that concept frequently means management co-opting employees. You get them to identify with management rather than with their coworkers.

I would have a typical report with problems, go through the process of contacting the inspector, and then document it (see documenting in the Activity Log above). In a flash I would get emails from the account manager wanting me to follow up. Or I would get an email claiming that a question I had wasn't really a problem at all (I was just too stupid, I guess).

After a series of condescending emails from one specific account manager, I'd had enough. I emailed her that I was tired of the nasty emails.

The Christian thought that was "disrespectful" and--poof!-- I was suddenly out of a job.

7. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

The Christian is religious, or claims to be religious. You half expected there to be a bright heavenly glow from the aquarium-like office, or perhaps a chorus of angels. An altar for blood sacrifice would be apropos.

I'm tolerant of religious belief, although admittedly skeptical. I've done the religion thing and the more I examined things the less I believed. But I don't think religion mixes with business any better than it mixes with politics.

It's especially disturbing when religion is used as a hammer. Its punitive and vindictive side comes out instead of the compassionate side exemplified by The Golden Rule. I have the feeling that The Christian knows more about the punitive side of religious belief than about the compassionate side.

It was a little like the climatic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Nazis believe they have found the ultimate weapon in the Ark. But when they open it all kinds of monstrous creatures rush out. People are being killed and faces are melting. You had to walk softly when you walked by The Christian's office.

8. QUIET DESPERATION

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau could have been a reviewer at Anonymous Inspections.

When you talk about how much you hate a job some enterprising sort will ask, "Then why don't you just leave?" It should be so simple.

In our system jobs are a little like musical chairs. When the music stops people scramble for the chairs and someone is always left out. You need some things, like money for rent, or health insurance, so you grit your teeth and try to slog through another day or week.

I've spent a few decades now going to jobs I hate because it's the lesser of two evils. It's go to a job I hate or starve.

Many of us spend our lives in quiet desperation, not getting the opportunity to fulfill our dreams or potential. We spend our lives on the treadmill of working paycheck to paycheck for too little money and no appreciation, hoping for that little annual raise, and that someway somehow there is a way out. But it's a system that rewards the few at the expense of the many with reminders of how “lucky” we are to have jobs. Some luck.

2009-03-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

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REAGAN: SOCIALIST FOR THE RICH

From its inception the United States has had inequality. The well-to-do find rationalizations for why they deserve everything and no one else deserves anything. I've been reading a little of Arthur Schlesinger's book The Age of Jackson. Back in the 1830's the debate raged about inequality. Amos Kendall, a supporter of President Jackson, observed: "In all civilized as well as barbarous countries a few rich and intelligent men have built up nobility systems; by which, under some name, and by some contrivance, the few are enabled to live upon the labor of the many." In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected. He was a great believer in "nobility systems" and orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth from the middle and working class to the very rich. This commentary by Ravi Batra is at www.truthout.org:

Let's go back to the early 1980's. In 1981, Reagan signed a law that sharply reduced the income tax for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The president asserted his program would create jobs, purge inflation and, get this, trim the budget deficit. However, following the tax cut, the deficit soared from 2.5 percent of GDP to over 6 percent, alarming financial markets, sending interest rates sky high, and culminating in the worst recession since the 1930's.

Soon the president realized he needed new revenues to trim the deficit, bring down interest rates and improve his chances for reelection. He would not rescind the income tax cut, but other taxes were acceptable. In 1982, taxes were raised on gasoline and cigarettes, but the deficit hardly budged. In 1983, the president signed the biggest tax rise on payrolls, promising to create a surplus in the Social Security system, while knowing all along that the new revenue would be used to finance the deficit.

The retirement system was looted from the first day the Social Security surplus came into being, because the legislation itself gave the president a free hand to spend the surplus in any way he liked. Thus began a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class, especially the self-employed small businessman, to the wealthy. The self-employment tax jumped as much as 66 percent.

2009-03-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

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THE RICH AREN'T SO DIFFERENT AFTER ALL

In right wing land we're told that the rich are special. They're the "achievers," the risk takers, the innovators, the virtuous, and deserving of so much more than the rest of us. I've never bought that idea. I worked for a company for seven years where the owner didn't work, but collected handsome checks from the blood,sweat, and tears of her employees. A good deal of wealth in this country is inherited. A lot of it comes from financial manipulation such as we've seen with AIG. This commentary by Michael Hiltzik is at www.latimes.com:

That the point is even open for discussion suggests that a sea change is taking place on the American political scene. For decades, the wealthy have been held up as people to be admired, victors in the Darwinian economic struggle by virtue of their personal ingenuity and hard work.

Americans consistently supported fiscal policies that undermined middle- and working-class interests partially because they saw themselves as rich-people-in-waiting: Given time, toil and the magic of compound interest, anyone could retire a millionaire.

That mind-set has all but been eradicated by the damage sustained by the average worker's nest egg, combined with the spectacle of bankers and financial engineers maintaining their lifestyles with multimillion-dollar bonuses while the submerged 99% struggle for oxygen.

(The price of admission to the top 1% income-earning club last year was roughly $400,000.) That may account for the near-total absence of public outcry over President Obama's proposal to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans -- except of course from the wealthiest Americans.

2009-03-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

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BYE BYE RIGHT WING HATE RADIO

A lady wrote a letter to The Fresno Bee criticizing right wing gasbags Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The Bee has a comments section for people to respond to letters and, of course, the Ditto Head community was represented. One response said something about "the left," assuming that the writer was on the left. Criticizing the tactics and misinformation of Limbaugh and Hannity automatically puts you on the left? Who knew? Rush Limbaugh could claim that he parted the Red Sea and the Ditto Heads would rush to his defense because they're morons. The good news is that right wing hate radio is declining in California. They had they heyday and we see the catastrophe that has resulted. This article by Michael Finnegan is at www.latimes.com:

Tune in to conservative talk radio in California, and the insults quickly fly. Capturing the angry mood of listeners the other day, a popular host in Los Angeles called Republican lawmakers who voted to raise state taxes "a bunch of weak slobs."

With their trademark ferocity, radio stars who helped engineer Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise in the 2003 recall have turned on him over the new tax increases. On stations up and down the state, they are chattering away in hopes of igniting a taxpayers' revolt to kill his budget measures on the May 19 ballot.

But for all the anti-tax swagger and the occasional stunts by personalities like KFI's John and Ken, the reality is that conservative talk radio in California is on the wane. The economy's downturn has depressed ad revenue at stations across the state, thinning the ranks of conservative broadcasters.

For that and other reasons, stations have dropped the shows of at least half a dozen radio personalities and scaled back others, in some cases replacing them with cheaper nationally syndicated programs.

2009-03-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

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BUSINESS AND EMPLOYEES: A ONE-SIDED RELATIONSHIP

I lost a job I'd had for almost seven years on February 11. I had an email exchange with an abusive supervisor and the office manager considered my response to be "disrespectful." I suspect it was all a pretext because the company is having major financial problems, I'm over 40, and voila! You cut people who are past 40 because their health insurance costs more. You bring in some part-timer with no benefits. So I identify with this article by Dave Lindorff at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Welcome to the American business world.

It is, for the most part, an ugly, heartless place where loyalty is rewarded with abuse and relationships are intensely hierarchical, one-sided and ultimately totally artificial. It is a place where managers do not have to follow the basic rules of human decency by which they for the most part live in their private lives.

Across the country, every day, some 20,000 or more American workers are getting sacked these days by managers who are focused on bottom lines and satisfying greedy investors. A shockingly high percentage of these victims of recession and corporate greed get little or no notice. One reason for this shabby and abusive treatment is that companies don't want word leaking out about their difficulties and their cutbacks. Bad news about layoffs can hurt stock prices, can alarm customers and can worry creditors.

Many employers even attempt to block fired employees from collecting unemployment compensation (an employer's unemployment insurance rate is determined by experience--the greater the number of workers you fire who go on unemployment, the higher your premium). They do this by claiming the worker was fired "for cause." This forces the sacked worker to appeal and go through a hearing process, all of which can take weeks, with the outcome uncertain.

2009-03-09T19:08:00.000-07:00

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GETTING OLDER IS A SIN IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY

I'm going through my third layoff in this decade. I suspect a large part of it is that I'm over 40. Once you hit 40 in this society you have a target on your back. It's hard to get hired and if the economy turns sour you're immediately a target for a layoff. Businesses can always rationalize job cuts so that don't openly admit they're discriminating by age, but the large number of Baby Boomers getting laid off isn't just coincidental. This is yet another argument for a national health care system. Then businesses won't have the excuse that health care costs for older workers gives them good reason to lay off older workers. This commentary by Susie Madrak is at crooksandliars.com:

If this is true, this is exactly why it would be such a good idea to lower the Medicare age to 55 - because otherwise, industry paints a target on every Boomer back:

Every day there's another layoff announcement, so Sean O'Grady finds himself confused about why his Philadelphia-based recruiting company, CareerTV USA Inc., is doing so well.

"We had to shake our heads at that," he said, "because we're doing our best sales ever, and we had our best quarter at the end of 2008."

So O'Grady started asking his clients to explain why they are bothering to recruit in these times, even when, in some cases, they are cutting back on hiring.

What he learned and what he is seeing "is the layoff of the baby-boom generation. Companies are filling those holes with bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college graduates.

"They are essentially trying to hire people they can pay less and get a lot of energy and enthusiasm," said O'Grady, 26, a senior producer at CareerTV.

[...] One was Andrew Vavra, 55, of Schwenksville, an unemployed marketing project manager. He had been to a another job fair recently "and no one under 40 was there," he said. "It made me angry.

GOP AGENDA: SHAFT WORKING PEOPLE

Suddenly, to hear them tell it, Republicans are fiscal conservatives. They don't want to burden future generations with debt. They haven't had any problem since the days of Ronald Reagan in doing just that when they could pursue their wars and give tax cuts to their fat cat friends. But if a dime goes to working people it's tragic and the end of western civilization. Working people are the majority in this country, and the government should be representing our interests. This commentary by Bill Gallagher is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The Republican Party of the 21th Century has no interest in doing anything to stop the wage inequality that chips away at the middle class. The economic "recovery" during George W. Bush's terms saw median incomes actually decline as wealth shifted to the top one percent.

Wage earning Americans are inordinately burdened with the responsibility of paying for Bush's debt while people living off investments and hedge fund managers saw their tax obligations significantly reduced. Does any sane person believe the Republicans want to upset that gravy train and change the tax codes?

If Republicans had their way, they would eliminate unions and restore despotism in the workplace, embracing the mentality that, "Hey buddy, you're lucky to have a job. If you complain you're outta here." Republicans want nothing whatsoever to do with safety and health in the workplace. The Democrats do.

We have the most expensive and inefficient health care system on earth and the Republicans are fighting to preserve the status quo. The drug companies and insurance companies profit mightily from the failed system and dump their campaign money into Republican coffers. The GOP wants to preserve Bush's privatization of many Medicare programs and Republican lawmakers still insist the government cannot negotiate prices with drug companies. How's that for a sound business practice?

The Republicans scoff at green energy and government incentives to develop and use renewable energy. They remain wed to the oil and coal companies and prefer continued dependence on imported oil and the absurd notion popularized by the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin that all we have to do to become energy independent is to "drill, drill, and drill."

2009-03-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

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THE LYING, LYING CORPORATE MEDIA

The corporate media are running around like Chicken Little and squawking, "Tax increase, tax increase." They're spinning President Obama's proposals as a massive tax increase in a time of recession. What they aren't mentioning is that the majority of us are getting tax cuts. The tax increases are only on people making $200,000 and above. And the tax increases aren't draconian. They're the same rates people paid during the 1990's. This article by Jamison Foser is at www.mediamatters.org:

Last week, President Obama unveiled a budget outline that extends the Bush tax cuts for all but the top two percent of taxpayers and makes permanent a tax credit of up to $800 for low- and middle-income workers that was included in the recent stimulus package, among other tax cuts.

On the other hand, individual taxpayers with taxable income above $200,000 ($250,000 for families) per year would pay more in taxes under Obama's plan, under which the tax rates paid on income in the top brackets would revert to their levels under President Clinton in the 1990s -- from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent. Slate.com's Daniel Gross estimates that for someone with $350,000 in income, this will amount to about $1,500 a year in increased taxes.

So: Obama's plan cuts taxes for the vast majority of Americans, while raising them for the small number of people who make more than $200,000.

But the media, eager to hype their bogus "war on the wealthy" storyline, have portrayed it as a tax increase.

2009-03-05T11:43:00.000-08:00

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THE ONLY THING CONSERVATIVES DO WELL: WHINE

A lot of places I go, for some inexplicable reason, have Fox News on the television. Fox News should more properly be called The Republican Propaganda Network. It's just one whining story after another about President Obama's efforts to save the economy. The "ideas" of the people at Fox News and the people they support have been given too much opportunity already. We see the horrendous results. People are losing jobs, homes, savings, and hope. But right-wingers whine and whine about what victims they are. This article by Thomas Frank is at www.commondreams.org:

Capitalist self-pity was much in vogue. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, looking tanned and groomed and yet strangely mechanical, joked that he needed to get through his speech "before federal officials come here to arrest me for practicing capitalism."

Jim Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia, moaned that the "philosophy" one encountered in the land these days was that "people who succeed and have wealth are bad people, and they're entitled to be discriminated against in the tax code."

Perhaps this was because the current economic crisis was being "overblown," as claimed Lew Uhler, who heads the National Tax Limitation Committee. The administration was trying "to create as much trouble for all of us as possible, and we're here to create trouble back, back, back!"

A little while later, Mr. Uhler lapsed into the same confused zombie cry as the tea partiers across town: "We're not going to stand around and take it anymore! We're mad as hell and we're not taking it!"

They're not going to take it anymore? I guess it's supposed to be obvious that conservatives are history's real victims -- that their imagined suffering at the hands of that Big Deficit to Come trumps the global systemic economic crisis and all the upheaval it may unleash.

2009-02-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

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THE WEALTHY HAVE WAGED CLASS WARFARE ON US

Now that President Obama has released his first budget and the budget contains provisions for raising taxes on the rich we will hear the caterwauling from the right about "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth." But for decades the right-wing policies pursued by our government have effectively been transferring the wealth to the richest people in this country and systematically destroying the working and middle class. We have had policies that ship jobs to other countries. The minimum wage has barely budged in comparison to the explosion in CEO salaries and perks. There has been an active effort to destroy the union movement. The rich have received massive tax breaks that in many cases mean their effective rate of taxation is lower than that of working people. I have no sympathy for these creeps. This article by Jamison Foser is at mediamatters.org:

But the real problem with Cummings' article -- and with the rest of the week's news reports about "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth" -- is that they frame Obama's proposals in such negative terms. It's hard to think of a single example of tax or spending policy that doesn't in some way "redistribute wealth." Some redistribute wealth upward, some redistribute wealth downward. But the media only seem to break out the "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth" pejorative when the wealth in question is heading to those who are not already wealthy.

(At this point, it should be noted that big-name political reporters earn considerably more money than most of the people who read and watch their reports. According to Sean Quinn at FiveThirtyEight.com, one reporter asked after Gibbs' briefing yesterday: "Did you notice all the questions about taxes came from reporters making over $250,000 a year, especially the TV guys?")

THE FREAKS OF THE FAR RIGHT

Sometimes when you look at the denizens of the Far Right in this country you have to wonder why they aren't in a circus sideshow somewhere next to the three-headed chicken. Their idea of "Americanism" is for a few people to have everything and everyone else to have nothing. They claim that God is on their side. They talk about "freedom" while doing everything in their power to suppress freedom. Smoke a joint and go to prison, but engineer a massive Ponzi scheme and you're paying homage to the "free market." This article by Bob Cesca is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

After nearly three decades of Reaganomics in which the wealthiest two percent have grown exponentially wealthier while middle class wages have remained stagnant, a growing faction of super rich Americans is seriously pissed off -- and their Wingnut Revolution is upon us.

Sure, the interests and influence of the wealthiest two percent make them more responsible than most for the free market policies that created this current economic crisis. But if there's one thing we've learned about those responsible for this recession, it's that the concept of accountability is about as foreign as their live-in au pairs. Instead, they're trying to pin this on Barney Frank and a legion of "losers" (read that: working class minorities) even though Ben Bernanke himself has debunked this myth.

2009-02-21T11:54:00.000-08:00

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THE MISERIES OF JURY DUTY

Jury duty has become a plague in Fresno County. I've gotten four summons in just eight years. The last three times I got excused without having to report to the courthouse. Not this time, though.

Among the things I hate is the downtown location of the courthouse. Parking can be a nightmare. The court has free parking across from the baseball park, but if you're unfamiliar with downtown it can be a problem finding the parking lot.

Then you ride a packed shuttle to the courthouse and go into the Jury Assembly Room. You turn in one of the forms they sent you with the summons and they call roll. Then they come back with the dreaded announcement that you've been assigned to a courtroom.

You go through a metal detector. You have to empty your pockets and even take off your belt and watch. If the machine beeps, you have to go back through the process.

The elevators are packed and slower than a garden snail.

You go into the courtroom, which has absolutely no windows, and they call roll again.

The judge comes in and reads the charges against the accused. The the first eighteen names are called for people to report to jury box. They are handed a green sheet questionnaire.

The judge asks if the prospective jurors know the attorneys, witnesses, or the defendant. He asks if there are any religious or philosophical reasons someone couldn't serve on a jury. He asks about hardship jury duty would impose.

Then the defense attorney and the prosecutor start asking questions of the prospective jurors. They are looking for biases that might make an impartial verdict impossible. After that, they have challenges to people they think would be biased and they excuse those people.

You go through this process repeatedly until a jury and six alternate jurors get selected.

I would be in favor of a professional jury system. Everything else about the criminal and civil justice system is done by professionals. Judges are professionals, attorneys are professionals, and the law enforcement personnel are professionals. The biggest issue would be keeping professional jurors from becoming too chummy with judges and attorneys and becoming biased. But anyone who thinks the current system isn't already stacked against poor defendants is kidding himself.

I wrote our esteemed governor about my issues with coercive jury duty months ago and never got a reply. I also left a phone message and never got a reply, which shows what politicians think of ordinary constituents. We're just there to provide bodies to this process so they can create the illusion that justice is being served.

2009-02-08T12:31:00.000-08:00

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LIMBAUGH, REPUBLICAN DEMAGOGUE

People who faithfully listen to Rush Limbaugh and spout his talking points are like mindless drones. They proudly call themselves "Ditto Heads," announcing to the world that they don't think for themselves. The irony is that the policies pushed by Limbaugh are hurtful to his devout followers. Now Limbaugh has arrogated to himself the position of leading the Republican party. Let's hope so. Most people don't care for Limbaugh and the extremism he represents. If he is the face of the Republican party, it means the even further demise of the GOP and I'm all in favor of that. This article by Faye Fiore and Mark Z. Barabak is at www.latimes.com:

Limbaugh has plenty of critics, not all of them liberal or Democrats. Some Republicans worry that the 58-year-old AM radio icon, highly effective at rallying disenchanted conservatives, may be turning off the less ideological voters whom Republicans need if they hope to again become a majority party.

"The question is: Are we going to have an all-white-man litmus test under the Republican Party? Or is there room for diverse opinion on environmental issues, on the issue of right to life, the issue of taxes and spending?" said Rich Bond, a GOP strategist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee. "There must be room for dissent in the Republican Party. It must be sincere. It must have comity."

To some, Limbaugh crossed a line when he recently rooted for Obama's downfall. Asked along with other prominent political types to write 400 words on his hopes for the president, Limbaugh said: "I don't need 400 words. I need four: I hope he fails."

2009-02-04T16:36:00.000-08:00

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

REPUBLICANS: THE TAX CUT IS MY SHEPHERD

Republicans, whose policies created the economic crisis we face now, are obstructing passage of a stimulus package because they want tax cuts for their fat cat friends. It's the same stuff that got us into this hole. It's almost like a religion with these clowns. You can almost see them on bended knee, looking heavenward, and reconstructing the 23rd Psalm. "The tax cut is my shepherd and I shall not want." Joe Conason talks about the reality of the stimulus package vs. the myths propagated by self-serving Republicans, who put fat cats before country. This commentary is at www.observer.com:

Another persistent myth denigrates spending on food stamps, unemployment insurance, tuition aid and similar programs as “welfare” that doesn’t promote growth. According to this argument, assistance to the poor doesn’t qualify as “stimulus” because it doesn’t create public assets such as roads or bridges. But the real purpose of fiscal stimulus is to boost demand in the economy and prevent the bottom from dropping out under prices for goods and services—in short, to forestall a deflationary spiral. Giving money to families that will purchase things immediately is the best kind of boost, as both Moody’s and the Congressional Budget Office have noted in recent studies.

It is true that we need to make real investments in transportation, energy, education and technology for the future—and that our future fiscal difficulties will be eased if we make those investments now. Yet the most immediate need is to promote demand, which will restore confidence and encourage investment.

What we ought to learn from this episode is that extreme inequality reduces national economic stability. The falling wages of working families forced them to rely too much on credit to maintain and improve their standards of living. Restoring the American dream means putting a floor under family incomes and reducing the gap between the richest and poorest, not only for the sake of simple justice but because that is the most reliable economic policy for the nation as a whole.

REALITY: MOST OF US WON'T GET RICH

Back in the days of aristocrats and peasants the peasants knew they wouldn't get rich, so I doubt they identified much with the people in the big castles. In the United States we get brainwashed into thinking that we, too, could be rich under the right circumstances. That's a part of the reason people don't rise up against the massive inequality in this country. This discussion by John Buell is at www.commondreams.org:

During the campaign, Democrats argued that working and middle-class citizens would be better off under their tax proposals. This debate is important, but it obscures one quintessentially American trait. More workers in the U.S. than in other nations are convinced they are going to become rich. They identify with the interests and ideas of the rich. It is important to reduce taxes on the working class. Nonetheless, fair taxation and economic justice are less likely as long as many believe they are only a little more hard work - or one lottery ticket - away from wealth.

Recent studies show that rags to riches stories, so widely publicized here, are actually less common than in much-reviled and more egalitarian European social democracies. Nonetheless, statistical attacks on mythology often fail to address the gut level concerns that feed it. Reformers must counter Horatio Alger tales of fortune tapping the hardworking for great wealth. Many of the largest modern fortunes are not the result of work or clever invention but insider deals that harm ordinary workers and even investors.

Hank Paulson's bailout was administered by Wall Street insiders, who showered billions of dollars on a narrow cadre of investment bankers. These banks in turn plot more mergers even as they abstain from lending to productive enterprises. The income investment bankers make from marketing exotic derivatives that destabilize the world economy is then taxed at about half the rate of plumbers' incomes. The plumber trying to start a business is paying more taxes so that investment bankers can pay less.

2009-01-28T17:13:00.000-08:00

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

GOP: GREED ON STEROIDS

I think of what Joseph Welch said to red-baiter Senator Joseph McCarthy: "Have you, Sir, at long last no sense of shame?" Republican policies have created the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression (which was also caused by Republican policies) and they want to continue more of the same. If the word chutzpah ever applied to anyone, it's to this gang of thieves. Bob Herbert writes about it in this column at www.nytimes.com:

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

2009-01-26T16:05:00.000-08:00

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

THE SAME OLD STORY WITH THE REPUBLICANS

Republican leaders in Congress don't like President Obama's stimulus package because it provides for spending and not for tax cuts. We have to keep in mind that when Republicans talk about tax cuts they're not for you and me. They're for their fat cat friends. History proves that spending generates far more jobs and stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. What the Republicans are really afraid of is a successful Obama administration because that would send them into the wilderness where they belong for years and years. This commentary by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:

The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending. Meanwhile, it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan. But rather than accept that implication, conservatives take refuge in a nonsensical argument against public spending in general.

Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration’s chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.

THERE'S NO FREE LUNCH

In essence, what Ronald Reagan and proponents of "supply side economics" have preached is a free lunch. You can cut taxes and spend and the road will lead us to the promised land. Supply side economics says that when you cut taxes for rich people they will invest the money they saved in taxes and create jobs and prosperity for all. What we've seen through the Reagan and two Bush administrations is massive deficits, a huge gap in inequality, rising poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and inadequate government services. This commentary by Thom Hartmann is at www.commondreams.org:

George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts – particularly a cut to a maximum 15 percent income tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive in the mail – and blowing out federal spending. Bush even out-spent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible.

And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

2009-01-25T10:04:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2009

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

HERE IN WINGNUT COUNTRY

I've come to the conclusion that The Fresno Bee should change its name to The Wingnut Daily from the right-wing rants in the Letters to the Editor section.

In the past week or so I've seen letters complaining about President Obama's inauguration being too expensive. It was actually comparable to the cost of George W. Bush's inauguration.

I saw one nut going all the way back to the New Deal. He was outraged that "liberals" wanted Gitmo closed, but didn't object to the detention of Japanese-Americans in the 1940's. I wasn't alive back then, which precludes any protest about the detention back then. I think that detention was wrong, one of the stains from that era, but the torture of prisoners at Gitmo is even worse.

One guy, typically smug, said he wasn't particularly bothered at the idea the government might have spied on him. If you really believe in the Constitution, and if you realize the far-reaching implications of the government illegally spying, you should be bothered.

Today we have a guy talking about the "godly principles" of the founders. Godly principles like slavery, subjugation of women, genocide of Native Americans, and protecting property owners above all. There are things I admire about the founders, but their writings show they didn't believe in the fundamentalist god right-wingers espouse.

2009-01-21T15:18:00.000-08:00

January 21, 2009

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

Congratulations to President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. I like some of what I've seen already. Rescinding Bush's global gag order, suspending some of Bush's "midnight regulations," and reviewing the situation in Gitmo are a good start. I hope that the Obama administration will look at full investigations of the crimes committed by the Bush administration and hold all the responsible parties accountable. We need to look to the future, but we can not ignore the crimes of the past.

THE REAL STORY OF PREDATORY CAPITALISM

Free market savants link capitalism and "freedom" in one sentence. It's interesting to note, though, how repressive capitalism has been and continues to be here and around the world. As this author points out, many capitalist countries are by no means free. The commentary by Michael Parenti is at www.commondreams.org:

The corporate capitalists no more encourage prosperity than do they propagate democracy. Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.

A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy's notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work-for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.

In the corporate world of "free-trade," the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels.

2009-01-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2009

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

SAY NO TO FORGIVE AND FORGET

It would have been easy after the Second World War ended to say we shouldn't pursue war crimes against the perpetrators of the Nazi atrocities. Germany was defeated. We could have looked forward, not back, and left the atrocities to molder. But war crimes trials were the right thing to do. No trial, no punishment, could begin to establish justice, but the trials were the closest we could come. And so it is with Bush and his cohorts. They should not be allowed to sidle off into a comfortable retirement. The full scope of their crimes should be aired out in full investigations and trials. This commentary by Paul Krugman is at www.commondreams.org:

Why, then, shouldn't we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn't there be some penalty for the Bush administration's politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we're told that we don't have to dwell on past abuses, because we won't repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration's political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won't do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we've already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it's giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off - which isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it's true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we'll guarantee that they will happen again.

2009-01-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

January 15, 2009

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

A Word From Rubber Stamp Radanovich

There's nothing like a missive from your hard right-wing Congressman to warm the cockles of your heart. And to think that tax money goes to pay for this drivel to be sent in the mail. The Congressman from this district, George Radanovich, has consistently supported the Bush administration, so I have attached the moniker "Rubber Stamp" to describe him.

Ole Rubber Stamp claims in this mailing that, . . . "Americans have lost a sense of personal responsibility, much of which has been facilitated by an overreaching federal government. The vast expansion of the government into the private sector has enabled a culture of irresponsibility with regard to serious matters such as debt and finance."

Of course, it's all our fault! The sharks on Wall Street, who managed to shed regulation like a duck sheds water, don't have any hand in this. The bought agencies of the federal government, who didn't fulfill their oversight duties, had nothing to do with it either. It's just us irresponsible people out here in consumer land.

Rubber Stamp has a survey attached to his little propaganda piece about issues most important to "you and your family." There's nary a word about ending the war in Iraq, restoring civil liberties, providing regulatory oversight, or impeaching the members of the Bush administration who gave us this nightmare.

It's a pity that Democrats have not put up any serious candidate to get this guy out of Congress. Let's hope that changes in the next election cycle.

2009-01-11T11:27:00.000-08:00

January 11, 2009

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

WHAT A LEGACY

George W. Bush has said he doesn't worry about what history will think because he won't be around to read it. To the contrary, he can pretty much determine his legacy right now. He has led the most corrupt and incompetent administration in our history. He failed to stop the terrorist attacks on 9/11 despite ample warnings. He lied us into a war in Iraq that has rained death and destruction on Iraqis and killed and wounded so many of own military. He has ignored global climate change, which threatens all life on earth. He leaves the worst economy since the Great Depression. This commentary by Helen Thomas is at www.commondreams.org:

Because of Bush's policies, the U.S. also is complicit in the Israeli attack on the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip by providing a "made-in-America" high-tech arsenal for the assault and blocking a ceasefire for nearly two weeks, a move intended to help the Israelis consolidate their hold.

Not to worry, Bush says he isn't concerned about how history will view his militant eight years in the White House, telling ABC News that he "won't be around to read it."

Well, they say that journalism is the first draft of history. So I am going to predict that those future historians will not deal kindly with the Bush presidency.

It's true -- as Bush and company point at their proudest achievement-- there have been no new terrorist attacks on the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001.

But they fail to acknowledge administration mistakes before and after that fateful day, starting with the fact that White House and security officials ignored significant early warnings of an imminent strike against the U.S.

2009-01-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

January 6, 2009

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

CALIFORNIA: GOOD RIDDANCE TO BUSH

The last paragraph of this article contains the rather interesting observation that California will miss Bush because we won't have to him to “kick around” anymore. What nonsense. Bush has done incredible damage to California and to the rest of the country. The article by Carla Marinucci is at www.sfgate.com:

The 43rd president's legacy in the Golden State, according to the unsparing assessment of Democratic consultant Phil Trounstine, is "zilch."

"He regarded California sort of like France - as a foreign entity for which he had nothing but scorn," said Trounstine. "Except for this: He did more damage to California than he ever did to France."

With just 15 days remaining for the Bush administration, political observers note that the Republican president's chilly relationship with the decidedly blue state - a relationship that is poised to undergo a revolution with Democratic President-elect Barack Obama - means that many here will define the Bush legacy in California as forgettable at best.

2009-01-05T16:46:00.001-08:00

January 5, 2009

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

The media and political establishment in the United States are strongly pro-Israel. We're told repeatedly that the Israelis are under dire threat from their Arab neighbors. We aren't told how the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip basically suffer from apartheid. Now we're told that the Israelis are dropping white phosophrous shells on the mostly civilian population in Gaza. This is reprehensible against even military targets. This article by Jeremy Hammond is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated pieces of property in the world. The presence of militants within a civilian population does not, under international law, deprive that population of their protected status, and hence any assault upon that population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime.

Moreover, the people Israel claims are legitimate targets are members of Hamas, which Israel says is a terrorist organization. Hamas has been responsible for firing rockets into Israel. These rockets are extremely inaccurate and thus, even if Hamas intended to hit military targets within Israel, are indiscriminate by nature. When rockets from Gaza kill Israeli civilians, it is a war crime.

Hamas has a military wing. However, it is not entirely a military organization, but a political one. Members of Hamas are the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Dozens of these elected leaders have been kidnapped and held in Israeli prisons without charge. Others have been targeted for assassination, such as Nizar Rayan, a top Hamas official. To kill Rayan, Israel targeted a residential apartment building. The strike not only killed Rayan but two of his wives and four of his children, along with six others. There is no justification for such an attack under international law. This was a war crime.

2008-12-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

December 28, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

A CROOK BY ANY OTHER NAME

As George W. Bush finally leaves the world stage, leaving disaster in his wake, we can already see efforts to revise the history of the Bush administration. Revisionism is common in history. Many times the revisionists take a more critical look at historical figures, but sometimes they attempt to flip history on its head. There were attempts to make Richard Nixon look better. The right-wing revisionists have contorted themselves in discussions of Ronald Reagan. We can expect a full-fledged effort to make the filthy Bush administration look competent. This commentary by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

As George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make their case for some positive legacy from the past eight years, two arguments are playing key roles: the notion that torturing terror suspects saved American lives and the belief that Bush’s Iraq troop "surge" transformed a disaster into something close to "victory."

Not only will these twin arguments be important in defining the public’s future impression of where Bush should rank on the presidential list, but they could constrain how far President Barack Obama can go in reversing these policies. In other words, the perception of the past can affect the future.

Though most current thinking holds that George W. Bush might want to trademark the slogan "Worst President Ever," America's powerful right-wing media (and its many allies in the mainstream press) will surely seek to rehabilitate Bush’s reputation as much as possible.

Even elevating Bush to the status of a presidential mediocrity might open the door for a revival of the Bush Dynasty with brother Jeb already eyeing one of Florida’s U.S. Senate seats and possibly harboring grander ambitions.

2008-12-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

December 20, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT WING CONTEMPT FOR WORKING PEOPLE

According to right-wingers, we of the working class aren't "achievers." We who do the drudge jobs, the dangerous jobs, the dirty and smelly jobs are just there to be squeezed for the last cent of profit while the "achievers" put their profits in the bank and complain about any concessions to workers. In California it has been increasingly difficult to even file for unemployment. When you call to file you get a phone tree message that they're just too darned busy to take your call and they hang up on you. I have a friend who was laid off and has tried for two weeks to get through. It's disgraceful. I'm hopeful, like Bob Herbert in this column, that the Obama administration will bring positive changes for working people. This column is at www.nytimes.com:

Ordinary workers have suffered. It took years to get a lousy little boost in the minimum wage for the working poor. Attempts to expand health insurance coverage were fought almost to a standstill. Guaranteed pensions vanished. And the maniacs who set fire to the economy with their incendiary financial instruments (yet another form of voodoo) were hot to privatize Social Security.

As Andy Stern, president of the huge Service Employees International Union, told me on Friday: “We’ve had a 25-year experience with market-worshipping, deregulating, privatizing, trickle-down policies, and it has ended us up with the greatest economy on earth staggering, and with the greatest amount of inequality since the Great Depression.”

The contempt for workers over this long period has hardly been hidden. Until Mr. Bush was forced by circumstances to tap the TARP program for the auto industry loans (small potatoes compared with the gargantuan Wall Street bailouts), the administration had gone out of its way to keep the program’s hundreds of billions of dollars reserved for the elites of the financial services industry and their associates.

2008-12-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

December 14, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH DESTRUCTIVE TO THE END

George W. Bush is rushing through a series of so-called "midnight regulations" that will have severe negative impact on the environment and civil liberties. He can get away with this because of a loophole in the law that allows him to bypass Congress. It reminds me a little of a defeated military foe that burns the bridges and poisons the grain. Bush isn't satisfied with the damage he's already done to the United States and the world. This article by Paul Harris is at www.guardian.co.uk:

The Bush moves have outraged many watchdog groups. 'The regulations we have seen so far have been pretty bad,' said Matt Madia, a regulatory policy analyst at OMB Watch. 'The effects of all this are going to be severe.'

Bush can pass the rules because of a loophole in US law allowing him to put last-minute regulations into the Code of Federal Regulations, rules that have the same force as law. He can carry out many of his political aims without needing to force new laws through Congress. Outgoing presidents often use the loophole in their last weeks in office, but Bush has done this far more than Bill Clinton or his father, George Bush sr. He is on track to issue more 'midnight regulations' than any other previous president.

Many of these are radical and appear to pay off big business allies of the Republican party. One rule will make it easier for coal companies to dump debris from strip mining into valleys and streams. The process is part of an environmentally damaging technique known as 'mountain-top removal mining'. It involves literally removing the top of a mountain to excavate a coal seam and pouring the debris into a valley, which is then filled up with rock. The new rule will make that dumping easier.

Another midnight regulation will allow power companies to build coal-fired power stations nearer to national parks. Yet another regulation will allow coal-fired stations to increase their emissions without installing new anti-pollution equipment.

THE UGLY HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Let me be frank. I detest the Republican party. In its whole history, except for a very brief interlude with Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican party had tried to make serfs out of working men and women. They've tried to destroy unions, opposed any kind of fair wage compensation, used hatred of gays and minorities to win elections, created phony scares of Communism and terrorism, and consistently wrecked the economy. This commentary by J. Miller Rampant is at http://jamillerrampant.blogspot.com:

When the Republican Party handed itself heart and soul to Big Business in the 1890s, it was the start of an epic battle to defend power and privilege in the United States at all costs. Briefly, under Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican Party was captured by the progressive wing, and TR had little sympathy for the "malefactors of great wealth" as he called them. But by the 1920s the fanatically pro-business, anti-worker orientation of the Republican Party was set. I have wracked my brain and I cannot think of ANY time the Republicans EVER acted in the interests of ordinary working men and women. They and their allies fought savagely against unions, never hesitating to use violence and state power to destroy them. (There is a myth that violence in labor disputes is only union-generated; check out Henry Ford's war against the unions to see a powerful refutation of this, or the war of the coal mine owners against the unions in West Virginia and Kentucky.)

This pro-business, anti-worker faction of the Republican Party hated FDR as if he were Satan incarnate. It is this faction of the Republican Party that fought against child labor laws, the right of workers to organize, minimum wage laws, worker safety protections, and every other proposal that was designed to grant working men and women the rights and dignity they deserved. The modern descendants of these violently anti-worker conservatives control part of the Republican Party today. They are the ones who voted against financial aid to the Big Three automakers so they could kill off the United Auto Workers, their sworn enemies since the 1930s. We should not be surprised.

2008-12-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH'S BLOODY HANDS

Right-wingers are busy little revisionists. They have to be because their policies create such disasters. After Ronald Reagan left the White House the busy little revisionists were telling us that the massive deficits created by Reagan's policies weren't really his fault. In fact, they say, there were more tax revenues coming in; it was just Congress spending too much money. Now the busy little revisionists are telling us that Bush "kept us safe" from terrorism. He "liberated" the Iraqis. He brought down the guy who killed over 300,000 of his "own people." Never mind that Bush has been responsible for more death and destruction than Saddam Hussein ever was This commentary by Barry Nolan is at www.commondreams.org:

After attending a cheery little GOP Christmas party, and in the charitable spirit of the season, Wall Street Journal columnist and Republican stalwart Peggy Noonan reflected on the Bush years Friday. (You can read the full column by clicking here.) She declares that when historians look back on Bush and try to sum it all up, they will most likely say something like: "At least he kept us safe." Merry Christmas President Bush. Ms. Noonan then advises the Democrats to pay proper attention to the warnings contained in national security studies. Darn good advice.

But strangely, her column avoids any mention at all of the rather strongly worded security warning that was contained in the Presidential Daily Briefing delivered to President Bush one month before the 9-11 attacks. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," the warning contained the rather prescient observation that: "FBI information...indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." Sadly, that warning to Bush gained little traction with Republicans and 2,973 people died on 9-11. There was no mention of those dead in the column.

Ms. Noonan also avoids any mention of the 4,209 US service men and women who have been killed in Iraq, where the terrorists could simply walk to work. No mention of the 30,000 wounded. No mention of the 445 US contractors killed in Iraq. No acknowledgment that many of these men and women were in the National Guard and were called away from their useful civilian jobs in America as firemen, policemen, doctors and lawyers, and sent to die in a reckless and needless war in Iraq.

PEARL HARBOR AND THE DARK RIGHT-WING PSYCHE

One common trait that runs through right-wing land is paranoia. Right-wingers see conspiracies everywhere. That's why Joseph McCarthy red-baiting was so effective with right-wingers back in the 1950's. That red-baiting propelled the career of Richard M. Nixon. Right-wingers have promulgated the myth that FDR wanted the United States to get into World War II and allowed Pearl Harbor to happen because Pearl Harbor provided the excuse to enter the war. The whole idea is ludicrous. This article by Sherwood Ross is at www.commondreams.org:

The idea that FDR, a former assistant secretary of the Navy in World War One, would have deliberately concealed knowledge of an imminent attack on a U.S. base, defies everything known about the character of the man, his lifelong love of ships, (see his childhood sketches on the wall at Hyde Park), and his visionary efforts to build shipyards to mass produce warships and to modernize the fleet upon taking office in 1933. In fact, FDR sparked the largest naval buildup in U.S. history from the time he took office, doubling naval personnel between 1939 and 1941 alone. Six months after Pearl Harbor at the battle of Midway, the Japanese navy suffered a terrible reverse largely at the hands of U.S. vessels built before the war under FDR or under prior presidents. If FDR had advanced knowledge of an imminent attack to precipitate a war with Japan he would at minimum have ordered the fleet into battle readiness and sent it steaming out into open water. That FDR knew the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was coming and allowed it to happen is one conspiracy theory that should be sunk promptly.

2008-12-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

December 2, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

Republican philosophy is to benefit the few at the expense of the many. They try to con us into believing that the benefits to the rich will trickle down to the rest of us. History shows what a lie that is. The incoming Obama administration needs to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. This commentary by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:

President-elect Obama has talked of a “new dawn of American leadership.” Three-quarters of a century ago, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal and said his biggest task was “to put people to work.”

That’s as appropriate a cue as any for the next president. I hope Mr. Obama’s “new dawn” portends more than just a few nibbles around the edges of change. We need change that brings about more shared sacrifice in wartime and tough times, and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources all the time.

I want to know who in the Obama administration will be listening to the young girl on the South Side of Chicago whose future is constrained by a lousy public school, and the factory worker in Toledo whose family’s future has been trampled by unrestrained corporate greed and unfair trade policies.

All the evidence is that the next administration will be competent and smart as hell. Now I’d like to know for whom they plan to deliver.

2008-11-28T12:10:00.000-08:00

November 28, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

Early indications are that the incoming Obama administration will not pursue war crimes charges against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. As uncomfortable as it may be, Bush and Cheney should undergo a full investigation and trial. They have deliberately and wantonly committed crimes against "terrorist" detainees. They have circumvented or outright broken U. S. law. They are not above the law. This article by Liliana Segura is at www.alternet.org:

Common consensus is that the Bush administration has been the most lawless in U.S. history. From its illegal invasion of Iraq to the corporate-assisted, warrantless wiretapping of its own constituents, the Bush White House seems never to have held a view of the law from below. And, since long before the election of Barack Obama, a number of groups and individuals have called for accountability, from a vocal network of people calling for impeachment for Bush's illegal and fraudulent invasion of Iraq, to, this summer, the bluntly labeled campaign, Send Karl Rove to Jail.

But if ever there was a stain on the fabric of American democracy that must be deserving of prosecution, it is the dark legacy of torture left by the Bush administration. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to the CIA's "secret sites," proof abounds that the U.S. government engaged in systematic torture that was approved by top government officials. Ironically, a central laboratory for this corrosion of the country's moral and legal code was the very office charged with defending the rule of law: the Department of Justice.

2008-11-19T15:58:00.000-08:00

November 19, 2008

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ON LIBERTARIANS

In my view the word "mandatory"is one of the ugliest and oppressive in the English language. When someone tells me something is "mandatory" it immediately raises my hackles. So I probably have a little libertarian in me. And yet, overall, I think the ideas libertarians advocate are utopian at best, destructive at worst. I agree with libertarians on social issues. I want government to butt out when it comes to what I watch, read, think, listen to, what religion I practice or don't practice, and other personal issues. But I also like things like clean and safe drinking water, safe over the counter drugs, safe food, a decent infrastructure, public libraries, a functioning air traffic control system, a system to make television and radio frequencies work, and so on. This article by Ernest Partridge is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Libertarians routinely trot out horror stories about government waste, fraud, and abuse, and measure these troublesome anecdotes alongside an unrealizable ideal of a "perfectly functioning market." However, this argument commits the fallacy of disparate comparison by comparing what the perfect market would do in theory with what imperfect governmental agencies, at their worst, have done in fact. No thoughtful liberal defender of public regulation of the environment in liberal democracies will pretend that this approach is perfect. In fact, as everyone knows, regulatory agencies are under constant assault and their public service is constantly compromised, usually by the very free market forces and private interests that are celebrated by the libertarians. But if the libertarians have a better alternative, then it must be shown to be preferable in practice, rather than in ideal theory. However, history shows that the unconstrained free market, privatization and the absence of "government interference" has given us opium in cough medicine, spoiled meat, child labor, mine disasters, black lung disease, air and water pollution, depletion of natural resources, and now the collapse of the financial markets.

"The free market," that cornerstone of libertarian theory, cannot survive without a governmental referee, for the unconstrained and unregulated "free market" contains the seeds of its own destruction. Though free market theorists are reluctant to admit it, capitalists are not fond of free markets, since open and fair competition forces them to invest in product development while they cut their prices. Monopoly and the elimination of competition is the ideal condition for the entrepreneur, and he will strive to achieve it unless restrained not by conscience but by an outside agency enforcing "anti-trust" laws. That agency, necessary for the maintenance of the free market is, of course, the "government," so despised by the libertarians. Evidence? Look to history. Then it was John D. Rockefeller, now it is Bill Gates.

2008-11-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

November 17, 2008

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GOOD RIDDANCE

After he resigned the presidency in disgrace Richard M. Nixon began a process of remaking himself into an elder statesman. I'm not sure Nixon ever succeeded. He was a vile, crooked man, and all the spin in the world couldn't change that. But we can probably expect a similar effort to rehabilitate the reputation of George W. Bush. Compared to Bush, Richard Nixon was a saint. Bush has taken arrogance and corruption and bloodlust to a whole new level. This article by Paul Waldman is at www.truthout.org:

This presidency is finally over. We can say goodbye to an administration whose misdeeds have piled so high that the size of the mountain no longer shocks us. In our lifetimes, we will see administrations of varying degrees of competence and integrity, some we'll agree with and some we won't. But we will probably never see another quite like the one now finally reaching its end, so mind-boggling a parade of incompetence and malice, dishonesty, and immorality. So at last - at long, long last - we can say goodbye.

And good riddance.

2008-11-12T16:14:00.000-08:00

November 12, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

HISTORY OF TAX CUTS ISN'T PRETTY

Every election season right-wing politicians, the gasbags on talk radio, and right-wingers everywhere proclaim the virtues of tax cuts, especially for the rich. According to them, tax cuts for the rich lead to investment, jobs, and prosperity for all. In fact, the opposite is true. The rich do very well. The rest of us face financial upheaval. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Even now, in the midst of the Bush disaster, I constantly see and hear tax cuts, particularly at the top, described as "pro-growth." So I went and looked at the numbers -- tax rates, tax cuts and tax hikes -- and placed them alongside job growth, the Dow Jones, growth in the GDP and median income.

The brute facts say the opposite of the myth.

The belief in tax cuts is a subset of the belief in Free Markets, with a capital F & M, which is a theological belief.

How do we distinguish a theological idea from a scientific (or rational) one?
According to Karl Popper, the great thinkers in the philosophy of science, a scientific idea has to be capable of being refuted. There has to be some theoretical test that could come out the wrong way, which would then say the theory is wrong.

On that basis, Popper rejected Marxism and Freudianism, along with religious theology, because no matter how many times they didn't work, there was always some explanation that said that the theory was right and if you just looked at the facts in some other way; you could make up some story that said your theory was still right.

2008-11-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

November 08, 2008

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RANDOM THOUGHTS

I briefly perused the letters page of The Fresno Bee. One letter writer was worried about "socialism" from Barack Obama. It shows how effective propaganda really is. The fact is that some socialism is really pretty good for most of us. I think it's good that we have things like unemployment insurance and Social Security. I hope that national health insurance will come to pass during Obama's administration.

Another letter writer tried to find a link between Obama talking about the needs of "main street" and a fall in the stock market the next day. I would point out that the stock market has consistently fallen in the past few weeks before Barack Obama was elected president. Another stock market fall was probably due to a report of the highest unemployment figures in fourteen years. The toxic effects of the Bush administration will be with us for some time. I think Barack Obama will make a huge and positive difference, but he can't fix so much damage instantly.

2008-11-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

November 05, 2008

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TOWARD A NEW POLITICS

I was cautiously optimistic as I saw Barack Obama take a lead in the major polls. There was always that nagging feeling that the Republicans would find a way to steal yet another election in the same way they stole the 2000 and 2004 elections. But Obama had too much of a lead. Too many of us were watching this time. The Internet has added a whole new dimension to politics. Some of it, such as the hateful smearing emails you get, are reprehensible. For the most part, though, the Internet is our way to participate in a national and international forum. Barack Obama represents not only the election of the first African-American president, but the beginning of a new era. We desperately need a 21st version of the New Deal. Working class people need to be represented again. This column by Mark Weisbrot is at www.commondreams.org:

For now, though, the domestic economy will occupy center stage as the new government faces the worst recession in decades, and one that is just beginning -- the housing bubble that caused this recession is only about 60 percent deflated. The people have voted for change, including expanded health care coverage and -- as they did in 2006 -- an end to the Iraq war. How much change we will actually see will depend more than anything on how much pressure there is from below.

But there is plenty to celebrate in addition to the election of our first African-American president. Forty years is a long time for a country to be on the wrong track, and even worse for one that has so much influence on the rest of the world. We now have an opportunity to resume the economic and social progress that was considered almost inevitable a few decades ago, and to address some of the most urgent environmental problems -- most importantly climate change -- which have only recently become widely recognized. Who knows, we might even stop invading other countries and move towards becoming a law-abiding member of the international community. Progress is now at least possible, although it will still be an uphill fight. As Obama himself said in his acceptance speech, "This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change."

2008-10-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

October 31, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANS

If conservatives could run things they really wanted, we'd be living in a coast-to-coast prison because conservatives are authoritarians to the core. They talk a good deal about "freedom," but it's only freedom for business. Conservatives want to tell us what we can read, what we can watch, what our sexual orientation will be, that women have no reproductive rights whatever, what drugs we can take to change our consciousness, and even that we can't have physician-assisted suicide if we're in agony and have a terminal illness. This commentary by John Dean is at www.commondreams.org:

Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.

Republicans' authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.

Authoritarian conservatives are primarily anti-government, except where they believe the government can be useful to impose moral or social order (for example, with respect to matters like abortion, prayer in schools, or prohibiting sexually-explicit information from public view). Similarly, Republicans' limited-government attitude does not apply regarding national security, where they feel there can never be too much government activity - nor are the rights and liberties of individuals respected when national security is involved. Authoritarian Republicans do oppose the government interfering with markets and the economy, however -- and generally oppose the government's doing anything to help anyone they feel should be able to help themselves.

2008-10-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

October 29, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

CONSERVATIVES KNOW HOW TO WHINE

If you listened to right-wingers you'd think the most important issues we deal with are: flag burning, school prayer, gay marriage, abortion, and taxes. Lord, help us, they whine about taxes. Since John McCain and Sarah Palin began their rant about "socialism" the right-wingers have been flooding The Fresno Bee with whiny letters about they will have to pay more taxes with an Obama presidency or how they have no "incentive" to work because of higher taxes. Obama is merely proposing to reinstate taxes to the level they were during the Clinton years. The sky didn't fall. And rich people never pay the highest tax rates. They have far more loopholes than we working class types. And I have a bulletin for these whiny right-wingers. Unless there are taxes to pay for the things that make society work their tax savings aren't going to do them much good. If everything collapses around them, what do they propose to do with their money then?

2008-10-28T16:11:00.000-07:00

October 28, 2008

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THE "REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH" CANARD

See McCain and Palin spin. Spin, spin, spin. They've tried almost everything out of the Republican playbook. First, there's the "war on terrorism." McCain was a POW in Vietnam, so of course he knows how to run the military and win the "war on terror." No? Palin lives in Alaska, which is near Russia, so of course she knows foreign policy. No? McCain is a "maverick," although he has voted with Bush 90% of the time. Palin is a "maverick" too, although her administration has all kinds of sordid deals leaking out. Now we hear the oldie but goodie spin about "redistribution of wealth." It's not much of a factor for most of us when you think about it because we don't have any wealth. But McCain and Palin would have you believe that Barack Obama will be reaching right into your wallet, swiping your money, and doling it out hither and yon. The real "redistribution of wealth" has been from the working class and the poor to the very rich and to corporations. This commentary by Bill Hare is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

John McCain has taken to once more demagoging the economic issue as the Republican right has traditionally done beginning in the modern era with the tactical and markedly unsuccessful propaganda front directed at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Roosevelt’s first reelection campaign in 1936 was fresh on the heels of congressional passage and the president’s signature on the landmark 1935 Social Security Act. There was much anger as well resulting from such sweeping legislation as the National Recovery Administration and the creation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 with disciplinary powers applicable to Wall Street.

Laissez faire was what the members of the American Liberty League, the vigilant opposition group to Roosevelt’s economic policies, favored. His comprehensive changes in U.S. economic policy during a critical Depression period prompted them to hurl charges of “socialism” while others went beyond that and asserted that FDR was a dictator of a Communist or Fascist model.

2008-10-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

October 27, 2008

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A SYSTEM RIGGED FOR THE RICH

Anyone who paid attention knows that the "trickle down" economics preached by Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and their devotees hasn't trickled down to the majority of us. It was never intended to benefit the working class or the middle class. It was designed all along to enrich the already rich. Tax cuts for the very wealthiest among us are only the most obvious example. Military spending is a cash cow for the rich and high long-term interest rates are another bonanza. This article by Robert Freeman is at www.commondreams.org:

John McCain’s drowning campaign has grasped at the straw of “socialism” to try to smear Barack Obama’s economic proposals. The dirty little secret is that socialism is much more characteristic of McCain’s policies than Obama’s. But it’s socialism for the rich.

It has been an explicit tenet of Republican economic policy since at least Ronald Reagan that the rich need more money and that it is the essential job of government to make sure they get it.

This is what David Stockman, Reagan’s first Budget Director, meant when he let slip that supply side economics was really a “Trojan Horse” intended to pass the nation’s wealth upward. Reagan pursued that goal with evangelical fury.

He enacted a dizzying array of tax and spending policies, all designed to benefit the wealthy. He cut the marginal tax rate for the highest income earners from 75% to 38%. A huge bonanza in its own right, this was only the beginning of the ladling.

Reagan’s massive budget deficits drove up long term interest rates, another boon to the rich. The rich are lenders and lenders prefer higher interest rates. Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, delivered in spades, turning the U.S. treasury into a printing press for the rich. The data speak for themselves.

Jimmy Carter's last deficit was $77 billion. By the end of the Bush I era, deficits had reached $300 billion a year and the national debt had quadrupled, from $1 trillion when Reagan took over, to $4 trillion. Interest payments on that debt had soared from $70 billion a year under Carter to over $300 billion a year.

THE INSECURE RICH

I believe the rich in this country like to tell themselves they're more deserving than the rest of us. They're more hard-working, more innovative, thriftier, more virtuous, favored by God, whatever. Never mind all the rich who inherited their wealth the way kings of old inherited their crowns. Never mind the component of luck. As this author says, most of us are born with two strikes already against us. It's a struggle in this society to survive, much less get rich. We have to scratch for things that should be ours: food, housing, education, and health care to name a few. This article by Maryscott O'Connor is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

A level playing field, indeed. Imagine an America in which everyone begins life on home base, with no balls and no strikes. Or, to use a clearer analogy -- on a level field, rather than some on a mountaintop and some in a ditch. Simple, really: Healthcare for all, food and shelter, education and basic employment -- all basic necessities guaranteed for all. For every other element one might wish, one would simply have to... work hard. To compete in a truly free market, unemcumbered by hunger, by the disabilities of race, family circumstances, "who you know." One's merits would truly be the yardstick by which accomplishments, achievements and advancements would be measured. THAT... is socialism.

Now, WHO could feel threatened by THAT?

I'll tell you who: The TRUE elitists in this VERY unlevel playing field on which we all stumble and on which we've been playing, blindfolded, listening to propaganda over their corporate-funded loudspeakers for generations. Propaganda that's told us that "Socialism equals Communism equals Russia equals Stalin equals BAD!

2008-10-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

October 23, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH'S VERY BAD KARMA

For many years the rich and privileged in the United States have reveled in their sense of superiority. They "deserve" tax cuts because they already allegedly pay more taxes than their fair share. They're the "achievers" who drive the economy. The rest of us are just slugs, you see, who should be grateful for the largess of these wonderful folks who are the doers and shakers. I have a funny feeling that the privileged wouldn't do very well without all the people who provide all the hard work, goods, and services that keep things going. Now the privileged are getting their comeuppance as the system they've created and supported is collapsing around them. This article by Chris Rowthorn is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The must ungodly, screaming, naked irony of this whole mess is that no one blames Bush for any of this. Oh no, the collapse of the entire American economy was caused by a few wanna-be homeowners who took loans they couldn't afford and a few "predatory lenders" who took advantage of them. Neither the media nor the public seem to notice that the "subprime borrowers" are merely the weakest link in the economic chain, the canaries in the coalmine of the American economy. No one mentions that Bush almost doubled the national debt. No one mentions the catastrophic rise in oil prices caused by the invasion of Iraq and the threat of war with Iran, or how it slowed the economy at the worst possible time. No one mentions how Bush wasted US$1 trillion on a war of choice (money which could pay for both the bailout plan and the stimulus plan combined). No one mentions that Bush showed no leadership whatsoever as the crisis deepened. In short, no one mentions how Bush took the American economy and drove it off a cliff. Let me be frank: trying blame the meltdown entirely on subprime borrowers and lenders is like trying to blame the entire Abu Ghraib torture scandal on Pfc. Lynndie England. If you believe that Bush bears no responsibility for present economic crisis, then I've got some mortgage-backed securities you might be interested in.

2008-10-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

October 22, 2008

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OUR VERSION OF THE GLASS CEILING

Since the Reagan administration there has been a dramatic increase in the gap between the rich and the poor. The rich have made out handsomely, but working class people have seen their incomes stagnate or decline. In the meantime, everything else is more expensive: food, gas, health care, education, and housing. It isn't just an issue of declining living standards. It's also an issue of social mobility, or the lack of social mobility. One of the great myths in the United States is that by working hard and playing by the rules you can climb the social mobility ladder. The fact is if you're born poor you're likely to remain poor. This article by Jim Lobe is at www.commondreams.org:

That gap has grown particularly large in the U.S. since 2000 -- that is, under the administration of President George W. Bush -- according to the report, which found that the gap between the U.S. middle class and the wealthiest 10 percent has also increased.

The growth in the divide has major implications for social mobility, according to OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria, who said the report's data had demonstrated that the notion that inequality encourages the poor to do better is false.

"Social mobility is low in countries with high inequality like Italy, the UK (United Kingdom), and the United States. And it is much higher in the Nordic countries, where income is distributed more evenly," he told reporters.

"This means that, in most high-inequality countries, dishwashers' sons are more likely to be dishwashers and millionaires' kids can assume that they too will be rich," he said, adding that governments could do much to promote mobility, particularly through progressive tax policies, greater social spending, job creation, and increasing investment in education.

2008-10-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

October 21, 2008

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WORLD'S SECOND LOWEST BUSINESS TAXES

Pity the rich and business in this country. If you listened to the right-wing's tales of woe, you would think they just get hit with massive taxation that pays "welfare" for all us deadbeats. The fact is that most of us in the working class pay a higher effective rate, the rate that really counts, than corporations and the rich. This commentary by David Sirota is at www.ourfuture.org:

This concept of effective tax rates (ie. the tax rate actually paid and enforced) is key to understanding the most telling part of this Fox News discussion - the part at the end where former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck parrots McCain campaign talking points about America supposedly having a very high corporate tax rate in relation to the rest of the world. This, says Dyck and fellow Republicans, is driving businesses to move offshore.

It sounds like a credible storyline, especially considering that officially, our corporate tax rate is somewhere between 35 and 39 percent. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

To know how high - or low - the effective tax rate is, you have to go beneath the top-line rate and account for all the loopholes, subsidies and write-offs - and the way to do that is by looking at corporate tax revenues as a percentage of a country's GDP. That way, you know how much corporations are actually paying as a share of your overall economy - in other words, you know the real corporate tax rate, not the fake one advertised by top-line numbers. And when you look at America's tax structure through this lens, you see that even the Bush Treasury Department admits we have the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the industrialized world (see page 42 of this report).

Indeed, this explains the dissonance between Republican claims of "highest corporate income tax rate in the world" and the recent Government Accountability report showing that most corporations pay no corporate income taxes at all. The latter is the truth - most corporations don't pay any taxes because of loopholes, writeoffs and subsidies that allow them to effectively reduce that 35 percent corporate tax rate to zero. In fact, many profitable corporations actually collect tax rebates. But as I told Fox News, we don't hear criticism of that kind of "corporate welfare" from the Republican mouthpieces deriding Obama's middle-class tax cuts as welfare.

LEARNING FROM HISTORY

The economic disaster we've suffered under the administration of George W. Bush is just the latest example of rotten Republican economic policies. Republican policies are always tilted toward the rich. To Republicans and their constituency inflation is the horror. A full employment economy with decent paying jobs means more inflation. So Republicans tailor their policies toward tax cuts for the rich and for business and toward higher unemployment to reduce inflation. This analysis by Larry M. Bartels is at www.csmonitor.com:

Lower unemployment under Democratic presidents has contributed substantially to the real incomes of middle-class and working poor families. Job losses hurt everyone – not just those without work. In fact, every percentage point of unemployment has the effect of reducing middle-class income growth by about $300 per family per year. And the effects are long term, unlike the temporary boost in income from a stimulus check. Compounded over an eight-year period, a persistent one-point difference in unemployment is worth about $10,000 to a middle-class family. The dollar values are smaller for working poor families, but in relative terms their incomes are even more sensitive to unemployment. In contrast, income growth for affluent people is much more sensitive to inflation, which has been a perennial target of Republican economic policies.

Although McCain portrays Senator Obama as a "job killing" tax-and-spend liberal, the new $60 billion plan Obama unveiled last week also has a tax break as its centerpiece – a tax break specifically tailored to create jobs by offering employers a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire over the next two years. Obama's proposal would also extend unemployment benefits by 13 weeks for those who remain jobless, as well as match McCain's in suspending taxes on unemployment benefits.

2008-10-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

October 20, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN'S PHONY CONCERN FOR PLUMBERS

John McCain evidently believes that the road to the presidency is paved with smears, innuendo, lies, and stunts like Joe the Plumber. McCain mentioned "Joe" in the third debate with Barack Obama, claiming that poor Joe would be severely hurt by Obama's tax plan. There were lots of problems with "Joe's" credibility, it turns out. But an examination of the real issue, the tax plan, shows that most plumbers and most working class people in general benefit far more from Obama's plan than would benefit under McCain's trickle down economics. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

2008-10-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

October 17, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

NO QUESTION OBAMA IS BETTER FOR MOST OF US

You can get fixated on the biggest problems confronting the United States. The big black cloud of the economy is off in one direction and the swirling winds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are off in the other direction. But there are other issues that will affect our day-to-day lives where it becomes imperative for an Obama victory in November. One of the biggest issues is the Supreme Court. We need an end to right-wing ideologues getting lifetime appointments to the Court. This article is at www.alternet.org:

When the polls open in 18 days, voters will be faced with a stark choice in presidential candidates -- a choice that ultimately comes down to one question: What do you want the next four to eight years of your life to look like? Because the next president will shape the issues that affect the way we live our day-to-day lives.

The future of Social Security, health care, education, income, employment, civil rights and democracy itself all hang in the balance. And the two candidates are worlds apart in their visions for the country.

From the fate of the Supreme Court to the future of Internet access, here are the 10 most important differences between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain.

2008-10-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

October 14, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

SHAMEFUL DISCRIMINATION IN FRESNO

The San Joaquin Valley is where tolerance and compassion come to die. This is a place inhabited by a horde of mouth-foaming right-wing reactionaries and it even extends into the Catholic Church. The right-wing is in a major tizzy over a California Supreme Court decision allowing gay people to marry. It will "destroy traditional marriage," we're told. A Catholic priest named Geoffrey Farrow spoke out. He admitted that he is gay and is voting against the hateful Proposition 8 favored by the right-wingers. So Farrow has now been cast out without a salary or benefits. How Christ-like is that? This article by Duke Helfand and Catherine Saillant is at www.latimes.com:

A week ago, Father Geoffrey Farrow stood before his Roman Catholic parishioners in Fresno and delivered a sermon that placed him squarely at odds with his church over gay marriage.With Proposition 8 on the November ballot, and his own bishop urging Central Valley priests to support its definition of traditional marriage, Farrow told congregants he felt obligated to break "a numbing silence" about church prejudice against homosexuals.

"How is marriage protected by intimidating gay and lesbian people into loveless and lonely lives?" he asked parishioners of the St. Paul Newman Center. "I am morally compelled to vote no on Proposition 8."Then Farrow -- who had revealed that he was gay during a television interview immediately before Mass -- added a coda to his sermon."I know these words of truth will cost me dearly," he said. "But to withhold them . . . I would become an accomplice to a moral evil that strips gay and lesbian people not only of their civil rights but of their human dignity as well."

On Thursday, Fresno Bishop John T. Steinbock removed Farrow, 50, as pastor of the St. Paul Newman Center, which primarily serves students and faculty at Cal State Fresno.

RIGHT-WING SMOKESCREEN ON HOUSING CRISIS

In a desperate attempt to blame someone else for the housing crisis right-wing bloviators have tried to blame Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Supposedly, Democrats in Congress resisted tougher regulation of Freddie and Fannie. Freddie and Fannie then allegedly made unwise subprime loans to "those" people who couldn't pay them back. Voila! Housing crisis. As usual, the facts don't support the right-wing claims. This article by David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hallis at www.truthout.org:

Conservative critics claim that the Clinton administration pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make home ownership more available to riskier borrowers with little concern for their ability to pay the mortgages.

"I don't remember a clarion call that said Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster," said Neil Cavuto of Fox News.

Fannie, the Federal National Mortgage Association, and Freddie, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., don't lend money, to minorities or anyone else, however. They purchase loans from the private lenders who actually underwrite the loans.

It's a process called securitization, and by passing on the loans, banks have more capital on hand so they can lend even more.

This much is true. In an effort to promote affordable home ownership for minorities and rural whites, the Department of Housing and Urban Development set targets for Fannie and Freddie in 1992 to purchase low-income loans for sale into the secondary market that eventually reached this number: 52 percent of loans given to low-to moderate-income families.

2008-10-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2008

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IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT-WING NONSENSE ON THE HOUSING CRISIS

Right-wingers are really reaching in their efforts to blame the current economic crisis on Democrats. It's not due to the free market predatory capitalism they love, they say, but goes back to the Community Reinvestment Act passed in 1977. The CRA was intended to make loans more available to people in poor and minority neighborhoods. Banks practiced something called "redlining." They were literally drawing red lines on maps of certain areas mostly comprised of minorities and refusing to lend there. The CRA was meant to address that. This editorial is from The Boston Globe at www.boston.com:

And yet the Community Reinvestment Act has nothing whatsoever to do with the subprime mess.

The law applies specifically to commercial banks, which in recent months have been the least volatile part of the financial-services industry. The measure was passed in 1977 to combat redlining, the practice of banks refusing to write mortgages in poor neighborhoods - even when they were taking deposits from residents of those neighborhoods.

To meet Community Reinvestment Act requirements, banks do make loans to low-income homebuyers - often in concert with community groups that provide financial advice and other crucial training. While banks at first had to be "dragged into participating," said Tom Callahan, executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, loans made under the auspices of the reinvestment law have performed remarkably well. One key initiative of this sort, the state's SoftSecond mortgage program, has a delinquency rate of 1.8 percent - compared with about 5 percent for all mortgages in Massachusetts.

2008-10-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

October 11, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT-WINGERS ARE WRONG ON EVERYTHING

Right-wing political philosophy in the United States is a little like Dorian Gray mixed with Fantasyland. At first glance, it's like Dorian Gray, very appealing in its concept that you can be "free" of the government and that you, too, can get rich. That's when Fantasyland kicks in. You believe that huge tax cuts for the rich will miraculously transform the economy into a giant money machine that will shower wealth down on everyone. You can simultaneously spend massive amounts on the military and make the United States the toughest kid on the block, cut taxes for the rich, and actually get a budget surplus. You can put prayer back in the schools, discriminate against gay people and other minorities, and take us back to the "good old days." This commentary by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.
Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

2008-10-08T16:17:00.000-07:00

October 08, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

HISTORY PROVES GOP'S LOUSY ECONOMIC POLICIES

As I've said before, Republican administrations are an almost certain guarantee of a lousy economy. If you like recessions, high unemployment, more poverty, and more despair, just vote Republican. The economy has always performed better under Democratic administrations. Our policies work and theirs don't. This article by Arthur Blaustein is at www.truthdig.com:

What is downright frightening is that Bush and John McCain seem to still believe an unregulated free market will solve America’s economic problems. Barack Obama, on the other hand, maintains that government has the responsibility to keep our economy on the right track. Obama says he will work toward reducing the debt and deficit. He pledges to help the middle class and the working poor by maintaining benefit levels and eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit. He will hold the line on our tax progressivity and fairness by rolling back the Bush tax giveaways to taxpayers earning over $250,000 annually. And Obama wants to target health care, education, affordable housing, alternative energy and the environment with critical investments.

McCain wants to privatize Social Security and probably Medicare, although he gets dangerously vague about this at election time. To finance government spending in the wake of his tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush has borrowed heavily from the Social Security Trust Fund. At the same time, the United States owes huge amounts to foreign investors. McCain and George W. are mired in the failed economic policies of Republican predecessors. In 1980, Bush I called supply-side policies “voodoo economics.” But he embraced these “trickle-down” policies in order to become vice president and then president. Reagan and both Bushes’ royalist economic policies of the 1980s and the past seven years were failures—a fool’s paradise built on the sands of borrowed time and borrowed money. The consequences were staggering debt, industrial decline, shrinking wages, four painful recessions, increased poverty and structural unemployment. The reckless Reagan-Bush-Bush spending and borrowing has brought us to the brink of social catastrophe and economic depression.

2008-10-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

October 05, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

PALIN LIED IN THE DEBATE ABOUT SUDAN

In the vice presidential debate with Joe Biden the question of genocide in Sudan came up. Sarah Palin said that her administration had advocated divestment of money Alaska had invested in the Sudan as a way of protesting the atrocities there. The record shows that's not true. She kept talking about cleaning up the corruption in Washington and Wall Street and connecting with "hockey moms." If she can't do the right thing on an issue as important as this, why should we trust her to be vice president or possibly president? This item comes from www.abcnews.go.com:

In Thursday's debate, Palin said she had advocated the state divest from Sudan. "When I and others in the legislature found out that we had some millions of dollars [of Permanent Fund investments] in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars," Palin said.

But a search of news clips and transcripts from the first three months of this year did not turn up an instance in which Palin mentioned the Sudanese crisis or concerns about Alaska's investments tied to the ruling regime. Moreover, Palin's administration openly opposed the bill, and stated its opposition in a public hearing on the measure.

"The legislation is well-intended, and the desire to make a difference is noble, but mixing moral and political agendas at the expense of our citizens' financial security is not a good combination," testified Brian Andrews, Palin's deputy revenue commissioner, before a hearing on the Gara-Lynn Sudan divestment bill in February. Minutes from the meeting are posted online by the legislature.
Gara says the lack of support from Palin's administration helped kill the measure.

2008-10-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

October 04, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT WINGERS BLAME THE POOR FOR LOUSY ECONOMY

The letters page of The Fresno Bee is a good barometer of right-wing talking points. In the past few days a couple of letters about the current economic crisis caught my attention. The letters made the astounding claim that George W. Bush wanted to regulate Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae back about 2003, that Congressional Democrats resisted, and that the problems at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae brought on our housing crisis and the rotten economy.
So, here we have right-wingers, who normally foam at the mouth about government regulations, suddenly embracing regulations.

But this goes even further. It claims that the problems at Freddie and Fannie are the main reason for the housing crisis, which isn't valid. It also puts the blame on poor and minority people getting affordable loans. The right-wingers claim that these loans were essentially forced on the banks and the loans went bad. So, there you have it: Bush's policies and the right-wingers free market ideas aren't responsible at all. It's just coincidence that we have rotten economies every time Republicans are in power. It's just coincidence that the GOP's fat cat friends always do well and that taxpayers, including those reprobate poor and minority people, wind up bailing them out. This commentary by Sara Robinson is at www.alternet.org:

Conservative pundits and politicians have piled onto the excuse like shipwreck victims clinging to a passing log: The real blame for the current economic crisis, conservatives would have you believe, lies not with anything they did, but rather with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act -- a successful Carter-era program designed to get banks to stop covert discrimination, and encourage them to invest their money in low-income neighborhoods.

It's always easy to tell when the cons are completely lost at sea. The lies get more absurdly preposterous -- and also more transparently self-serving. But when they go so far as to openly and unapologetically latch onto race and class as an excuse for their woes (which this is, at its heart), you know they're taking on water fast -- and scared of going under entirely.

You can hear the conservative commentators burbling this CRA fable from the Wall Street Journal to the National Review; from Rush to YouTube. Neil Cavuto put the essence of the argument right out there on Fox News: "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster." See! It's all the liberals' fault for insisting on social justice!

2008-10-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

October 01, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE END OF THE REAGAN ERA

The absolute disaster we've seen unfold in the financial markets proves conclusively that the free market economics advocated by right-wingers don't work. It's a system that enriches the few and impoverishes the rest of us. It remains stable only as long as the beneficiaries of the system keep their greed in check. But they never do. This article by Harold Meyerson is at www.washingtonpost.com:

We are, just now, stuck between eras. The old order -- the Reagan-age institutions built on the premise that the market can do no wrong and the government no right -- is dying. A new order, in which Wall Street plays a diminished role and Washington a larger one, is aborning, but the process is painful and protracted.

It shuddered to a halt on Monday, when House Republicans, by 2 to 1, declined to support the administration's bailout plan. To lay the blame on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech (in which she even noted the work of House GOP leaders in crafting the compromise) is to miss the larger picture: The proposal asked Republicans to acknowledge the failure of the market and the capacity of government to set things right. It asked them to repudiate their worldview, to go against the beliefs that impelled many of them to enter politics in the first place.

2008-09-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

September 28, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GOP'S RAW DEAL

The problems created by extreme right-wing ideology have been growing exponentially like a snowball rolling downhill. Most of the crises we now see can trace their roots back to the right-wing ideology that has prevailed since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Our prisons are bulging because of drug laws that are out of touch with reality. We are falling behind the rest of the industrialized world in math and science because right-wingers are looking for the Rapture and because they disdain science. We are seeing an increasing climate crisis because right-wingers won't acknowledge the obvious man-made causes of global climate change. We are stuck in a morally reprehensible war because right-wingers wanted to assert American power regardless of the consequences. The U. S. economy is in a mess thanks to the trickle down nonsense that started with Reagan and got ramped up under George W. Bush. This commentary by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Eric Schlosser calls for a second New Deal. The article is at www.commondreams.org:

Advocates of the free market must confront the fact that both the Great Depression and the current financial chaos were preceded by years of laissez-faire economic policies. Strictly enforced regulations not only protect consumers, they protect companies that behave ethically from those that don't. The sale of tainted baby food in China demonstrates, once again, that when industries are allowed to police themselves, there's absolutely no limit on what they'll do for money.

Third, we need reconstruction, not only of America's physical infrastructure, but also of its society. Today close to 50 million Americans lack health insurance. About 40% of the nation's adult population is facing medical debts, or having difficulty paying medical bills. A universal health-care system would help American families, while cutting the nation's long-term health-care costs. And a large-scale federal investment in renewable energy and public-works projects would build the foundation for a strong 21st century economy.
Contrary to the myth of the free market, direct government intervention has played a central role throughout American economic history, subsidizing the growth of the railroad, automobile, aerospace and computer industries, among others. It will take well-planned government investment to break our dependence on foreign oil and create millions of new Green jobs.

The events of the past month have proven, beyond any doubt, that the federal government must actively address America's great social and economic problems. That necessity was recognized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the 1930s -- and by his cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, a generation earlier.

BUSH'S SORRY RECORD

When you look back to the days prior to Hurricane Katrina ravaging the Gulf Coast you have to wonder why George W. Bush rode so high in the popularity polls for so long. His record from the very beginning has been stained with corruption. He got into the White House despite losing the popular vote because of his friends on the Supreme Court. His vice president, Dick Cheney, led an energy task force that conducted its meetings in secret, even though the need for energy dictates much about our lives. He was completely absent stopping the terrorist attacks on 9/11, but used that attack to bolster his popularity and to ram through tax breaks for his rich friends and to attack civil liberties. Hurricane Katrina revealed Bush for what he really was all along. Evidence that this war was justified on lies and now the economic crisis are just more proof of Bush's miserable record. This editorial is from The Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com:

As the Bush administration attempts to stabilize the nation's economy, we are witness to the final chapter of a period of perverse and dishonest leadership that has used its own crises to justify the expansion of its own power. This was a president who came to office on promises of modesty -- who championed a "humble nation," scorned nation building and promised a more limited role for government in the lives of its citizens. Then he presided over a six-year attempt to tear down and rebuild the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now has embarked on the most profound expansion of the federal government's role in the private economy since the Depression.

In both cases, the pattern is the same. Ineptitude led to crisis; crisis then became the argument for the radical expansion of executive power. The administration insisted that it exercise its new authority with a minimum of scrutiny by Congress, the courts or the public.

In the so-called war on terror, that has meant the abdication of our most basic American principles. We have forfeited privacy and honor -- the administration has monitored phones and e-mails without warrants and has secreted prisoners in foreign lands, arguing that they deserved none of our protections even while in our custody. As a nation, we have stooped to torture (while debating the meaning of the word) and refused to recognize one of our most basic Anglo-American notions, the principle of habeas corpus (thankfully, the Supreme Court, seven of whose members are Republicans, drew the line at that abomination). We have held prisoners in detention without trial, without charge, without end. In so doing, we have antagonized the world and debased America's moral authority to lead.

2008-09-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

September 25, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

WALL STREET COUNTS, BUT WE DON'T

We've heard conservatives talk about "personal responsibility" for years. In their ideal system government will never lift a finger to help people like you and me. It's all up to the "market." The "market" decides if you can have a decent job, decent wages, a place to live, food to eat, a chance for an education, and health care. But when Wall Street gets into trouble thanks to its own greed and corruption guess who's first in line to ask for a handout? The whole right-wing ideology of the free market should be thrown on the trash heap of history. This article by Helen Thomas is at seattlepi.nwsource.com:

What has happened to those conservative Republican leaders whose mantra was "government is the problem -- not the solution"?

Tell that to the once-bloated financial giants now standing in line for whopping government handouts to the tune of $700 billion. And who can forget those who wanted to "get the government off our backs"? Their silence now is deafening.
In the rush for bailouts for the hard-hit government mortgage finance giants, the U.S. Treasury seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and is trying to rescue American International Group, the largest insurer of the world. It allowed 158-year-old Lehman Brothers to collapse, but came to the rescue of the Bear, Stearns, another Wall Street firm.

RIGHT WING MAKE BELIEVE

What we're seeing now is really the culmination of what started during the Reagan years. Who better than a former actor to offer up a fairy tale world where cutting taxes could lead us to the land of Oz? Never mind that massive amounts of money were spent on the military, that we suddenly had gargantuan deficits, and that the gap grew dramatically between the rich and poor. Hard line right wingers will still defend Reagan, claiming that government revenues actually increased, and that the deficits were due to too much spending. To hear them tell it, Reagan had nothing whatever to do with the deficits, or the corruption that resulted from reducing regulations on business. This article by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The lead piper in this parade away from America’s tough choices was Ronald Reagan who insisted in his First Inaugural Address in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
As President, Reagan attacked the federal regulatory system and cut taxes so recklessly that his budget director, David Stockman, foresaw red ink “as far as the eye can see.” Reagan also justified fattening the Pentagon’s budget by citing dire warnings that the Soviet Union was on the rise (despite CIA analysis at the time that it was in sharp decline).

To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era’s feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or – in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s memorable attack line – they would “blame America first.”

Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking new media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan’s propaganda themes.

2008-09-23T16:37:00.000-07:00

September 23, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

WEALTH DOESN'T EQUAL MORALITY

Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham once described the awe of the rich in the United States as the "wish for kings." Our country was founded by breaking away from a monarchy, but there are many who would truly love a king. Since we don't have official royalty, they defer to the wealthy instead. Just as the "divine right of kings" was a belief system in the past, there are those now who believe that rich people are rich because it is somehow ordained by God. That idea gets shattered when you examine the very rich and see how they got there. Thomas Jefferson had it right in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote, "all men are created equal." No one is better just because they have a big bank account, and the interests of the very wealthy should not supersede the interests of the majority of us. This commentary by Alicia Morgan is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The Myth of the Free Market is exactly that - a myth. It’s a Utopian model that does not work in real life, because it only works if all things are equal - if the worker, the employer, and the consumer all have equal power and influence. And we know that is not true at all.

So - up to this point, we have: wages falling, prices rising, and profits escalating.
If the profit margin were roughly equal to the wage and price margin, one would assume that the market was working correctly - if there was a downturn that was felt by all, then it would be more or less attributable to forces that were outside of the wage/price/cost/profit structure - perhaps a natural disaster, governmental upheaval, or a failure of some aspect of production.

But if profits are rising for corporations, and growth is rising, and consumers are getting poorer at the same time, the only reasonable explanation is that those profits are coming from somewhere within that system - a transfer.

2008-09-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

GOP IS THE TITANIC

When the Titanic was built its builders thought the ship was unsinkable. Impact with an iceberg destroyed that idea and countless passengers died. The GOP has run all kinds of ideas past us, claiming that privatization and the free market can cure all ills. Never mind that we had a successful run from the time of the New Deal until the early 1970's with ideas that go contrary to what the GOP dishes out.

Since the 1970's, life has gotten considerably worse for the working class in this country. Unions, under constant assault by business elites and right-wing politicians, have seen their membership decline. Good jobs, especially in manufacturing, have been globalized and shipped offshore. We have seen deregulation of many key industries, such as the telecommunications industry, the airline industry, and banking and finance. Airlines are in big trouble now and we have seen the virtual meltdown of the financial sector in the past few days.

The Great Depression should have been a powerful lesson, but apparently it eluded Republicans. In this article Frank Rich talks about the McCain campaign and the consistent and repetitious use of lies. The press has been notably derelict in doing its job in coverage of Republican lies in the past. This commentary is at www.nytimes.com:

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

2008-09-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

September 17, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

FREE MARKET NOT SO GREAT AFTER ALL

You wonder how history might have been different if Ronald Reagan had been defeated in 1980 in his run for the presidency and sent back to spouting right-wing ideology on the rubber chicken circuit. When Reagan won the White House in 1980 it set in motion the extreme right-wing free market ideology that has resulted in the mess we see now. We've heard it from right-wing politicians, right-wing evangelicals, and the right-wing loudmouths on talk radio: free markets can cure anything that ails us. We have to get rid of big bad government. Social programs are horrible. Things like the minimum wage, national health insurance, and Social Security are "socialism." It always was nonsense. Letting business govern itself is like letting wolves loose among the sheep. This editorial looks at John McCain's attempt to distance himself from the Bush administration and the free market ideologues, even though McCain has been a proponent and supporter of those same policies. The editorial is at www.nytimes.com:

For decades, typical Americans have not been rewarded for their increasing productivity with comparably higher pay or better benefits. The disconnect between work and reward has been especially acute during the Bush years, as workers’ incomes fell while corporate profits, which flow to investors and company executives, ballooned. For workers, that is a fundamental flaw in today’s economy. It is grounded in policies like a chronically inadequate minimum wage and an increasingly unprogressive tax system, for which Mr. McCain offers no alternatives.

As for Wall Street, Mr. McCain blamed the meltdown on “unbridled corruption and greed.” He called for a commission to find out what happened and propose solutions. His diagnosis and his cure are misguided. The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices.

2008-09-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

September 16, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

BACK TO THE REAL ISSUES

Suddenly we don't have to read about the Great Depression anymore because we're seeing the Great Depression II developing. For years now, most of us have experienced flat-lining wages, increases in health care costs, longer periods of unemployment, and seeing jobs outsourced to other countries. We saw a despicable bankruptcy law that makes debt slaves out of us. We saw the Bush administration push through a huge gift for the pharmaceutical industry. Now, thanks to the right wing's beloved concept of deregulation, we're seeing a meltdown of the financial industry. Names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mae, and Fannie Mae are becoming household words. The stock market plummeted over 500 points yesterday. But John McCain and right-wingers tell us the economy is "fundamentally sound." For whom? This column by E. J. Dionne is at www.washingtonpost.com:

All of a sudden, the culture war seems entirely beside the point, an unaffordable luxury in a time of economic turmoil. What politicians actually believe about the economy, what fixes they propose, whether they side with the wealthy few or the hurting many -- these become the stuff of elections, the reasons behind people's votes.

And nothing more exposes the hypocrisy of financial elites riding the coattails of those who revere small-town religious values than a downturn that highlights the vast gulf in power between the two key components of the conservative coalition. Even cultural conservatives will start to notice that McCain's tax policies are geared toward the wealthy investing class and Obama's toward the paycheck crowd. Even the most ardent friends of business have begun to argue that a re-engagement with sensible regulation is essential to restoring capitalism's health.

For some time, McCain's strategists figured they could deflect attention from the big issues by turning Palin into a country-and-western celebrity and launching so many ill-founded attacks on Obama that the truth would never catch up. The McCain strategists' approach reflected a low opinion of average voters, and some Obama supporters began worrying that their opinion might be right.

2008-09-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GOP

Hate is what drives the GOP. Republicans essentially believe that they are better than other people. People of other ethnic groups, other income groups, other religions, other races, or who are intellectuals are either inferior or a threat to all that Republicans to believe to be good and decent.

Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy used hate and a ramped up fear of Communism to advance their agendas.

Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, famous as the site where three civil rights workers were murdered, as a signal to the states' rights crowd, the people one breath away from burning crosses and wearing white hoods.

George H. W. Bush benefited from the use of ads featuring Willie Horton, a black man who was a criminal, to underline the concept that "some people" have to be kept under control and in their place. George W. Bush has made all Muslims the enemy. He has benefited from the "fear card" perhaps more than his predecessors.

John McCain is using racism even more overtly because he's actually running against an African-American candidate. This commentary is at www.bobboblog.org:

The GOP hardcore base embrace bigots and liars like McCain/Palin because in the darkness of their own souls they hold those same values. As individuals they are too dishonest to get up and admit that in public. McCain/Palin gives them permission to feel good about their own bigotry and small-mindedness. Armed with a permission slip from two major political candidates, they can give full throat to their own worst instincts. They are cowards and if they had any sense of decency they would feel a deep sense of shame and would come begging for our forgiveness.

Fortunately, the GOP hardcore base is still a minority in this country. If the serial lying of McCain/Palin proves to be ineffective at turning them into a majority, McCain/Palin will end up being tossed into the political dumpster like a tied-off plastic bag of used diapers.

THE MYTH OF SELF-CORRECTING MARKETS

Right-wingers throw out crumbs to evangelicals, making them believe that God and country are important. But the true religion of right-wingers is the "free market." We're supposed to have an unbounded faith in the free market, that it's more efficient than government, that it's "self-correcting" when things go awry. Even though right-wingers won't admit it, the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Bear Stearns before that is a tacit admission that the market isn't self-correcting after all. Government has a definite role to play in the economy. If government has a role to play for the big players, then why not for us little people? This commentary by Deborah Stone is at www.commondreams.org:

Self-interest, profits and free markets, we have been promised, are the great social engines. Now, as the American housing market collapses and the world trembles before our mistakes, those profit-driven, supposedly self-correcting and perfectly efficient engines are turning against us like Frankenstein. Why did anybody ever believe that CEOs and shareholders whose every incentive leads them to seek greater profits would care about anything else, such as their purported government mission to foster homeownership and stable communities?

Maybe this is the ultimate lesson in why the Republican strategy of privatization and deregulation doesn't work. Markets depend on confidence--confidence that somebody stands behind the currency of exchange, confidence that somebody will hold buyers and sellers to their promises, and above all, confidence that if banks and big businesses crash, somebody will step in to help all the little people who might be wiped out with them.

It's telling that the very officials who have been dead-set against regulation and bailouts justify the new government plan as necessary to restore confidence. The markets are perfectly healthy, they kept saying, but the public's confidence is faltering. On July 17, just after the big bailout was proposed, Fannie Mae's CEO, Daniel Mudd, told Newshour's Judy Woodruff, "Fannie Mae is very financially sound. We have . . . more capital than we've had at any point in our history." If your capitalization is as strong as you say, asked Woodruff, why do you need this Treasury plan to help you out? "All the capital markets, the lending markets, are really built on confidence," Mudd replied. "Confidence has gotten jittery over the past quarter or so." It's important, he continued, "that there be a strong backstop (Mudd never uttered the words "bailout" or "rescue") in case that kind of lack of confidence and that kind of jitteriness continued for too long."

2008-09-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

September 13, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

SOME REAL QUESTIONS FOR PALIN

I know, I know. Barack Obama is running against John McCain for President. But when you factor in McCain's age and health you have to consider Palin a contender for the presidency. She would be the "heartbeat away" from the Oval Office. Vice Presidential candidates should be vetted the same way as presidential candidates. And Palin, like McCain, is sorely lacking in the qualities we need to lead this country. We're in one of the most dangerous times in human history and the neocons who support McCain and Palin have been responsible for throwing a lighted match on the powderkeg. This column by Katha Pollitt is at www.thenation.com:

Count me as a feminist who never believed that being PTA president meant you could be, well, President. The more time we spend on dippy ruminations--how does she do it? Queen Bee on steroids or the hockey mom next door? how hot is Todd, anyway?--the less focus there will be on the kind of queries that should come first with any vice presidential candidate, and certainly would if Palin were a man. Questions like:

§ Suppose your 14-year-old daughter Willow is brutally raped in her bedroom by an intruder. She becomes pregnant and wants an abortion. Could you tell the parents of America why you think your child and their children should be forced by law to have their rapists' babies?

§ You say you don't believe global warming is man-made. Could you tell us what scientists you've spoken with or read who have led you to that conclusion? What do you think the 2,500 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are getting wrong?

2008-09-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

September 09, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

PALIN THE RELIGIOUS WACKO

The First Amendment of the Constitution is the First Amendment for a very good reason. It provides for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. The "establishment" clause has been under constant assault by the religious right. They see no problem with government enforcement of their religious beliefs, especially in matters like abortion and school prayer. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, is about as far to the right as you can get and her ideas on religion are dangerous to our democracy. This column by Juan Cole is at www.commondreams.org:

Palin has a right to her religious beliefs, as do fundamentalist Muslims who agree with her on so many issues of social policy. None of them has a right, however, to impose their beliefs on others by capturing and deploying the executive power of the state. The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers' commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to "establish" or officially support any particular religion or denomination.

McCain once excoriated the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk as "agents of intolerance." That he took such a position gave his opposition to similar intolerance in Islam credibility. In light of his more recent disgraceful kowtowing to the Christian right, McCain's animus against fundamentalist Muslims no longer looks consistent. It looks bigoted and invidious. You can't say you are waging a war on religious extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat away from the presidency.

TRICKLE DOWN DOESN'T WORK

Even though he calls himself a "maverick," John McCain is offering the same old stale and failed policies of trickle down economics that started during the Reagan years. We're told over and over again that more tax cuts for the rich will produce wonders. What we get is more poverty, disappearing jobs, and massive deficits. The Bush administration should be offered as Trickle Down 101, the absolute and abject failure of the right-wing's free market ideology. This column by Dean Baker is at www.commondreams.org:

Senator McCain and his friends no doubt still believe that the economy's fundamentals are strong, but Friday's jobs numbers clearly show how bad things have gotten. The 6.1 percent unemployment rate reported for August is almost as high as the worst levels from the last recession. A broader measure of labor market weakness, that includes people who can only find part-time work or who have given up looking for jobs, is higher than at any point in the last recession.

When the labor market weakens, workers have less bargaining power with their employers. As a result, wages are trailing more than 2 percentage points behind inflation over the last year.

Wages are virtually the entire income for most workers. If the purchasing power of their wages falls by 2 percent, this is the equivalent of a 2 percentage point increase in their tax rate.

2008-09-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

September 07, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN-PALIN WOULD BE A DISASTER

We learn today that the big mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been seized by the federal government. It's a part of the continuing subprime mortgage crisis that is a direct result of the deregulation policies of the Bush administration and the free market disciples who drive Republican economic policies. Even though John McCain calls himself a maverick, he has voted with Bush 90% of the time. If anything, Sarah Palin is even more a doctrinaire right-winger than McCain. Her Medieval beliefs on abortion and social policy should give us major pause because McCain's age and health may prevent his serving out his presidency. This column by Frank Rich is at www.nytimes.com:

Sarah Palin makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech longer even than Barack Obama's - you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum's rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain's address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his often inaccurate swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn't smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech's central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

2008-09-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

September 05, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GOP EMPTY SUITS

Republicans offer war and more war, tax cuts for the rich, carte blanche for polluters, immigrant bashing, assaults on civil liberties and the Constitution, bigotry against anyone who's not white, male, and rich, and continued war on the working class. John McCain and Sarah Palin don't offer any positive change, just more of the same and maybe worse. Palin has been connected to the Dominionist movement, which would like to scrap the Constitution and make us live under Old Testament law. If the Taliban is your style, that might be appealing. This editorial is from The New York Times at www.nytimes.com:

Thursday night, Americans mainly saw the old John McCain. He spoke in a moving way about the horrors he endured in Vietnam. He talked with quiet civility about fighting corruption. He said the Republicans “had lost the trust” of the American people and promised to regain it. He decried “the constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving” problems.

But there were also chilling glimpses of the new John McCain, who questioned the patriotism of his opponents as the “me first, country second” crowd and threw out a list of false claims about Barack Obama’s record, saying, for example, that Mr. Obama opposed nuclear power. There was no mention of immigration reform or global warming, Mr. McCain’s signature issues before he decided to veer right to win the nomination.

ENOUGH HYPOCRISY TO GAG A MAGGOT

Kris Kristofferson wrote the lyric that said, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." That's about what freedom means to the Republican party. While their lily white speakers talked up freedom inside the convention hall, protesters outside the hall got arrested on the slightest pretext. It's a little like the "free speech zones" that have followed George W. Bush throughout his presidency. This column by Dave Lindorff is at www.commondreams.org:

McCain's party, and his fundamentalist Christian backers, are always attacking efforts by gay Americans to win the right to marry by saying that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but clearly, with over half of all those marriages between a man and a woman ending in divorce, it's not all that sacred, and McCain is living testament to that hypocrisy.

But this was just the most blatant of a string of hypocrisies that ran on for four days in the Twin Cities.

There was the long list of speakers touting America's "freedoms" as, outside the convention hall, police thugs dressed in military gear, and armed with huge batons and assault weaponry were bashing in doors and terrorizing journalists, arresting others and dragging them face down along the street, using teargas against peaceful demonstrators and arresting them by the hundreds.

There was McCain talking about how everyone, including the "child of Latino immigrants," is an American, to an audience of Republicans that was so embarrassingly white that you had to shield your eyes from the glare of the screen.

There was Sarah Palin, complaining about a media focus on her pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol, all the while shamelessly parading that same daughter and her 18-year-old impregnator, who was dragged down to the convention to be shown off after the two had been somehow convinced to get married and make the baby "legal."

There were the repeated characterizations of McCain as a battler against corruption and the influence of "special interests," without a word of mention of his having been the recipient of over $100,000 in cash from Charles Keating, a corrupt banker whose interests McCain shamelessly pimped for in Congress, only narrowly escaping indictment himself.

2008-09-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

September 04, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

LYING: WHAT REPUBLICANS DO BEST

Republicans can't govern. Every time we get a Republican administration it's like swarms of locusts descending on a wheat field. You get massive tax breaks for the rich, a deterioration of public services, government tilted very much to the interest of big business, tax money diverted to the Republicans' fat cat friends, and more and more government intrusion into our personal lives.

Sarah Palin, as the scripture says, is new wine in an old wine bottle. She's just a version of Spiro Agnew or Dick Cheney in drag. She's very good at sarcasm and hate speech, but not much for any constructive vision for the country. I find it astonishing that McCain and his camp talk about "putting the country first." When have Republicans ever done that in the past few decades?

Richard Nixon's operatives probably derailed the peace talks to end the Vietnam war because ending the war would have won the election for Hubert Humphrey. Reagan's operatives sabotaged efforts to free the Iranian hostages. Jimmy Carter would probably have won reelection if the hostage situation had been resolved. In a "time of war" George W. Bush pushed through huge tax breaks for his rich friends. Such unmitigated gall is nauseating. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

Now, however, Palin has been transformed into a maverick reformer. McCain’s campaign even cites her experience as an abuser of the earmark process as part of the reason she supposedly understands why it must be scrapped.

McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin said Palin’s successes in getting earmarked funds “was one of the formative experiences that led her toward the reform-oriented stance that she has taken as her career has progressed."

Nevertheless, Palin wrote in a newspaper column just this year that "the federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship." [For more details, see Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2008]

Beyond the GOP's reality-challenged speeches, there was the startling image of a nearly all-white convention – where only 36 of the 2,380 delegates were black, the smallest number in at least 40 years – rollicking in ridicule and bristling with animosity toward Obama, an African-American.

2008-09-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

September 01, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

IT'S ABOUT CRUELTY, NOT ABOUT LIFE

I've read about incidents in Islamic culture where rape victims get treated as criminals. The idea is that somehow the woman causes the man to commit rape. Now we learn that GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has stated that if her daughter were impregnated by a rapist she would not approve of an abortion. That is almost mind-boggling in its cruelty, and it's very indicative of how Palin would stand on other social issues. It's also indicative of where McCain would stand. This item comes from www.ownthesidewalk.com:

Why did John McCain pick Sarah Palin as his running mate?

Because in a 2006 gubernatorial debate, Sarah Palin stated unequivocally that if her teenage daughter were impregnated by a rapist, Palin would not allow her to consider terminating the pregnancy.

Now, that’s either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about the relentlessly complex issue of abortion. But to many people who might potentially vote for John McCain over Barack Obama, it’s a good thing. And more importantly, it’s something John McCain can’t say himself.

2008-08-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

August 31, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

DO YOU SEE THE IRONY?

Reports are that Hurricane Gustav may turn into another Category 5 hurricane. New Orleans has been evacuated in anticipation that Gustav is going to slam the Gulf Coast. It brings back memories of Hurricane Katrina from three years ago. The right wing has consistently denied the reality of global climate change. One of the consequences of climate change is monster storms like Katrina and Gustav.

John McCain has picked as his running mate a woman who denies the man-made causes of global climate change. McCain and Palin are supposedly headed to the Gulf Coast region. Gustav is even being used as an excuse for Bush and Cheney to ditch the convention. If McCain and Palin want to invoke God, I wonder why God is disrupting their convention? I wonder in human history when we've had such frequent occurrences of Category 5 hurricanes.

2008-08-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

August 30, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN PICKS FRONTIER WOMAN

Here we are in the 21st century, but John Sidney McCain clearly has a hankering for the past. McCain talks almost incessantly about being a POW in Vietnam. His policies hue to the laissez-faire rugged individualism me first tradition of Republican reactionary politics. It's a politics that comes down to a might is right philosophy. If you've got a military, solve differences with military responses. You steer government policy to benefit corporations and the rich. You oppose freedom of choice for women.

So we have a somewhat ironic selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate. If a woman were selected for the right reasons, I would at least give a favorable nod to McCain for that. But this is a selection that has "pandering" written all over it. Palin is virulently anti-choice, which appears to be her major appeal. She will enthuse the evangelicals who haven't been thrilled with McCain. She believes in what Mike Malloy has called "the talking snake theory of creation." She's anti-environment and doesn't believe human activity is causing global warming. She's a NRA member and hunter. Her history doesn't suggest someone who is in tune with the challenges of the 21st century. But neither does McCain's history, for that matter.

I can almost see Palin wearing bandoliers of bullets for a rifle and clutching a big hunting knife, still dripping from a fresh kill. I wonder if she churns her own butter and takes on grizzly bears bare-fisted.

This shows McCain's ultimate contempt for the American people and especially for women.

This column by Gail Collins is at www.nytimes.com:

John McCain has a low opinion of the vice presidency, which he’s frequently described as a job that involves attending funerals and checking on the health of the president. (Happy 72nd birthday, John!) There’s a lot we don’t know yet about Palin, and I am personally looking forward to deconstructing her role in the Matanuska Maid Dairy closing crisis. But at first glance, she doesn’t seem much less qualified than Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota who most people thought was the most likely pick. Unlike Joe Lieberman, Palin is a member of the same party as the presidential candidate. And unlike Mitt Romney, she has never gone on vacation with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

However, I do feel kind of ticked off at the assumptions that the Republicans seem to be making about female voters. It’s a tad reminiscent of the Dan Quayle selection, when the first George Bush’s advisers decided they could close the gender gap with a cute running mate.

The idea that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong. When the sexes have parted company in modern elections, it’s generally been because women are more likely to be Democrats, and more concerned about protecting the social safety net. "The gender gap traditionally has been determined by party preference, not by the gender of the candidate," said Ruth Mandel of the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

2008-08-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

August 26, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN=COLD WAR AGAIN

About all that John Sidney McCain has going for him is his record as a POW in Vietnam. Prior to getting shot down and captured, McCain dropped bombs from several thousand feet. He wasn't there on the ground to see the blood and carnage he created. That distance from blood and carnage is a part of his foreign policy. He can joke blithely, "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" without considering all the innocent civilians who would be slaughtered. McCain is part of the whole neocon cabal that wants endless war against any perceived enemies, whether they be terrorists, Russians, or Chinese. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

Another casualty of McCain’s endless Middle East wars, which soon could include Iran, would almost surely be America’s volunteer army. Though McCain officially opposes a restoration of the draft, it is nearly impossible to envision how his multiple wars could be waged without one.

And McCain also had made clear that he favors a neo-Cold War confrontation with Moscow over another part of the neocon agenda – the encircling of Russia with pro-U.S. regimes and the placement of strategic missile systems near Russia’s borders.

The fencing in of Russia fits with the goals of the neocon Project for the New American Century that envisions an endless era of U.S. military dominance that tolerates no potential rivals, whether an emerging China or a resurgent Russia. The recent Russian-Georgian conflict underscores the risks from this neocon concept.

Containing Russia in this way ultimately would require dangerous brinkmanship. And the McCain/neocon belligerence – like McCain’s melodramatic declaration “we are all Georgians” – would guarantee that one of these swaggering showdowns eventually would push the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation.

2008-08-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

August 24, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

MCCAIN THE REACTIONARY

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. You can easily get caught up in the idea that things just aren't the way they used to be, that somehow that past was better. I will grant there are things about the past I like better.

But there are many things about the past we would not want again. We don't want the Cold War back. We don't want racial segregation back. We don't want women forced into back alley abortions. We don't want the Gilded Age, although we've been living through a version of the Gilded Age in the past eight years. John McCain represents all the bad things about the past.

We need a country without a chasm existing between the rich and poor. We need a country that uses diplomacy to solve problems and not military responses. We need a country that cares about the environment and about providing for the needs of all its citizens. This column by Frank Rich is at www.nytimes.com:

How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell. It is not a story of endless conflicts abroad but a potentially inspiring tale of serious economic, educational, energy and health-care mobilization at home. We don’t have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they’re too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.) Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices.

Even as it points to America’s future, the Obama campaign also has the duty to fill in its opponent’s past. McCain’s attacks on Obama have worked: in last week’s Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, Obama’s favorable rating declined from 59 to 48 percent and his negative rating rose from 27 to 35. Yet McCain still has a lower positive rating (46 percent) and higher negative rating (38) than Obama. McCain is not nearly as popular among Americans, it turns out, as he is among his journalistic camp followers. Should voters actually get to know him, he has nowhere to go but down.

2008-08-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

August 19, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

IF YOU WANT A LOUSY ECONOMY, VOTE MCCAIN

A few days ago a typical right-wing letter to The Fresno Bee claimed that Democrats haven't learned that increasing taxes on the rich is just bad, bad, bad. The writer claimed it's not tax cuts for the rich that drive deficits, but spending. The problem is that constructive spending, things like education, health care, infrastructure, and protecting the environment isn't going on. We have too little spending on the crucial segments of our economy. We spend plenty on weapons and on military bases. History shows that Republican economics are a disaster. They've been a disaster since the days of Herbert Hoover. It's time the richest people in this society and corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. It's also time that money be spent legitimately. This article by Dean Baker is at www.commondreams.org:

Senator McCain now faces a similar situation in this election. He is stuck running on the record of a president who is presiding over an economy that is sinking into recession and is facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By contrast, Senator Obama can claim the legacy of the strong economy of the Clinton years.

Tarred with the most dismal record of job creation and income growth of any president since the Great Depression, it would be reasonable to expect that Senator McCain would be defensive on the economy; but not in Swift Boat America.

Instead Senator McCain is filling the airwaves with commercials telling the public that Obama’s tax increases will slow growth and cost the economy jobs. It’s pretty scary stuff to anyone who takes it seriously.

Of course, there’s no truth to Senator McCain’s Swift Boat economics. During the eight years of the Clinton administration, when rich people paid the same tax rates proposed by Senator Obama, the private sector added 15.8 million jobs. By contrast, in the seven years and six months of the Bush administration, when rich people paid the Bush-McCain tax rates, the private sector has added just 3.5 million jobs. And, it is losing jobs at the rate of almost 100,000 a month as President Bush prepares for retirement.

2008-08-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

August 16, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE DEADLY CONSEQUENCES OF STUPIDITY

The United States has a long history of anti-intellectualism. It baffles me that people don't like smart people. Maybe it's some kind of inferiority complex. But stupidity is costing us dearly. It allowed the most stupid man ever to occupy the Oval Office to assume power and proceed to wreck everything: the economy, foreign policy, environmental stewardship, and civil liberties. The war in Iraq has cost thousands upon thousands of innocent lives and disrupted the region. Lack of principle and ethics often go together with stupidity. This interview with Susan Jacoby is at www.alternet.org:

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it.
Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes "the jury is still out" on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments.

2008-08-12T16:05:00.000-07:00

August 12, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

REPUBLICANS AND POVERTY

Do you remember the song that said, "Love and marriage go together like a horse a carriage"? It's not quite so romantic with Republicans and poverty, but there is a definite relationship. Under the "trickle down" economics we saw during the Reagan-Bush years and now under George W. Bush poverty has dramatically increased in the United States. This article notes that Fresno has the highest working poverty rate in the country. Fresno, the home of freerepublic.com and an infestation of right-wingers. What a surprise. This article by Tim Jones is at www.chicagotribune.com:

The percentage of working poor in large metropolitan areas soared by 40 percent during the first half of the decade, reversing gains from the 1990s in the fight against poverty, according to a report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution.

THE OVERVIEW

The study covered 1999 through 2005 and examined 58 metro areas, finding that 34 reported increased rates of "concentrated working poverty," a measurement of low-income workers and families living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Twenty-four areas registered declining rates. Old industrial areas like Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cleveland recorded some of the highest poverty rates. The Midwest and Northeast recorded higher average rates than the South and significantly higher rates than the West.

The note about Fresno:

Detroit and its suburbs in 2005 had the highest concentrated working poverty rate in the Midwest: 27.5 percent, followed by St. Louis (21.6 percent), Cleveland (21.5 percent) and Chicago—plus its Illinois and Northwest Indiana suburbs—at 17.9 percent. The highest rate in the Northeast was the Philadelphia metropolitan area, at 25.5 percent.

The highest rates were recorded in Fresno, Calif., (30 percent) and Augusta-Richmond County, on the Georgia/South Carolina border (29.3 percent). Among the regions, the Northeast had the highest concentrated poverty rate at 17.6 percent, followed by the Midwest at 14.8 percent, the South at 13.1 percent and the West at 6.7 percent.

PRACTICE YOUR OWN ABORTION BELIEFS

I have not weighed in much on the subject of abortion. For one thing, I think abortion is a decision best left to pregnant women and those closest to them. I also think that people with religious objections to abortion who try to make their religious beliefs a part of secular law are violating the First Amendment provisions that prohibit establishment of a religion. Even people who believe in God and religion are divided on the subject of abortion. Some people object to all abortion; others believe abortion is justified when the woman's life is in danger or the pregnancy results from rape or incest. The Bible, if one wants to cite the Bible, doesn't even have much to say about abortion. The government should stay out of our personal lives, including the right to choice. This article by Caroline Arnold is at www.commondreams.org:

I can’t accept, either as a matter of personal conscience, or of my commitment to my neighbors and the planet we live on, that we should invest scarce resources, argue endlessly and fruitlessly, and punish women, neglect children and forestall medical research in order to keep every fertilized ovum alive.

I believe we have more important things to do — making sure children already born have enough to eat, medical care and education, and learning to live together without killing each other and consuming the planet we live on.

I don’t think the abortion question is about religion, except insofar as most religious people think that God doesn’t like it because it destroys a human life. What kind of a god worries about the destruction of some unviable human tissue but designs human reproductive systems with a 50 percent attrition rate? What kind of god gives males the choice to conceive a baby but doesn’t give females the choice to reject it? What kind of god allows older children to starve so that younger ones may be born, or permits babies to be born to a life of want, violence and fear? Not one I want to have anything to do with. And I won’t accept the “It was ever thus” argument about human frailty. Just because we humans have always done badly doesn’t excuse us from trying to do better, for ourselves, because we are all one family.

That said, however, I have to retreat a step. I do have a kind of religious faith, pretty much defined by what it is not. The Skeptic in me demands that the utilitarian condition must be satisfied — God cannot be less than as source of Goodness — love, grace, fulfillment — that is available to all creatures and living systems. But my Resident Mystic keeps insisting that a God worthy of human experience must be more than a bearded old man obsessed with sex and virgins, strewing goodness about while withholding it from sinners and showering wealth on entrepreneurial men, handing down Ten Immutable Rules for human behavior, torturing the wicked, and advising George W. Bush on how to conduct his war on terror. I believe we are called to imagine a God of Truth and Uncertainty, Beauty and Disorder, Joy and Loss, while we are challenged to love our neighbors and seek to live with them in peace.

2008-08-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

August 11, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

IT DOES TAKE A VILLAGE

Right-wingers argue that the society that works best is with government that works least. You can't have those nasty regulations. You can't have any social safety net because, you know, it makes people "dependent." Everything works best if it's privatized and it's every man for himself (women aren't much of a consideration in right-wing land). But the truth is that government has a vital role in providing and maintaining infrastructure, in providing a regulatory framework, and insuring that predators don't get free rein. This article by Joseph Stiglitz is at www.alternet.org:

Failures to promote social solidarity can have other costs, not the least of which are the social and private expenditures required to protect property and incarcerate criminals. It is estimated that within a few years, America will have more people working in the security business than in education. A year in prison can cost more than a year at Harvard. The cost of incarcerating two million Americans -- one of the highest per capita rates (pdf) in the world -- should be viewed as a subtraction from GDP, yet it is added on.

A second major difference between left and right concerns the role of the state in promoting development. The left understands that the government's role in providing infrastructure and education, developing technology, and even acting as an entrepreneur is vital. Government laid the foundations of the internet and the modern biotechnology revolutions. In the 19th century, research at America's government-supported universities provided the basis for the agricultural revolution. Government then brought these advances to millions of American farmers. Small business loans have been pivotal in creating not only new businesses, but whole new industries.

2008-08-04T16:12:00.000-07:00

August 04, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

CONSERVATISM IS A DISASTER

If you like jobs going offshore, if you like tainted food and medicine, if you like gargantuan government deficits, if you like the housing crisis, if you like roasting due to global climate change, if you like the government spying on you, if you like getting involved in bloody and unnecessary wars, and if you think that torture represents us at our best, you must be a conservative. This article by Greg Anrig is at www.washingtonpost.com:

The single theme that most animated the modern conservative movement was the conviction that government was the problem and market forces the solution. It was a simple, elegant, politically attractive idea, and the right applied it to virtually every major domestic challenge -- retirement security, health care, education, jobs, the environment and so on. Whatever the issue, conservatives proposed substituting market forces for government -- pushing the bureaucrats aside and letting private-sector competition work to everyone's benefit.

So they advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." President Bush has followed this playbook more closely than any previous president, including Reagan, notwithstanding today's desperate efforts by the right to distance itself from the deeply unpopular chief executive.
But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made, and in many instances, the dogma has actually created new problems. Particularly after Hurricane Katrina, when Americans saw how hapless the Federal Emergency Management Agency was, the public has begun to realize that the right's hostility toward government has produced only ineffective government.

2008-08-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

August 03, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

IF YOU CAN'T WIN, SMEAR

John McCain isn't such a maverick after all. He's following in the "grand" Republican tradition of smearing his opponent rather than running honestly on issues. Of course, McCain hasn't got many issues to run on. Everything the Bush administration has touched has been a disaster, and McCain only promises more of the same. So McCain has turned to the Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and Karl Rove playbook of running on non-issues. Attack your opponent and distract attention and maybe you can fool enough people to get elected. This article by By John Heilemann is at nymag.com:

For those not keeping score, a quick review of the McCain campaign’s lunge for Obama’s jugular. First, its new slogan: "Country first," with its inverse insinuation that Obama puts something else (i.e., his own ambition) ahead of the nation. Second, McCain’s accusation that Obama "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." Third, the McCain ad "Troops," which claims that Obama, while in Germany, "made time to go the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops—seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras." And, finally, the ad "Celeb," with its intercut images of Obama in Berlin, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears.

The strategy behind all this isn’t hard to discern: Drive up Obama’s negatives and render him unacceptable to pivotal voting blocs. Thus the depiction of him as too young, too feckless, and too pampered to be president. (In almost every shot in the McCain ads, Obama is smiling flashily, whereas McCain is pictured as weathered, sober, staring hard into the distance—a clever bit of jujitsu, using Obama’s pretty mug against him.) Thus the portrayal of him as precious, self-infatuated, and effete: "Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula," wrote campaign manager Rick Davis in an e-mail announcing "Celeb." And thus the emphasis on Obama’s rock-star persona, designed to engender envy and contempt among the swath of Middle America for which hipness is no virtue but a sign of pretension.

2008-07-29T17:04:00.000-07:00

July 29, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE MARCH OF STUPIDITY

I remember a quote from an Isaac Asimov novel: "Against stupidity even the gods themselves must contend." The gods would be very disappointed in the contemporary United States. It seems sometimes that stupidity is an epidemic. It's not just the abuse of the English language. It's the absolute inability to relate the past to the present, to separate the absolute nonsense we get from so many pundits and politicians from reality, or the taste in television shows that almost make stupidity a virtue. This article by Leonard Pitts Jr. is at www.commondreams.org:

I am not talking about ignorance. Ignorance is a lack of information; we’re all ignorant in one way or another. Nor am I talking about people prone to punctuation or spelling errors; we all make mistakes.

No, I’m talking about stupidity, which I define as an inability to analyze, draw conclusions from, or otherwise use information even when one has it. And stupidity is often characterized by smug indifference. When a CNN anchor drew Rinehart’s attention to his spelling errors, his reply was, ”I don’t necessarily care.” This is, I feel constrained to remind you, the elected representative of 220,000 people.

For as much as we obsess over black vs. white and red vs. blue, I suspect the defining division of this technology-driven era will be between those who have and can exploit information and those who do not and cannot. Between intelligence and its opposite. One wonders how long we can continue to equate stupidity with ”keeping it real,” being a regular Joe or Jane, and hope to continue leading the world.

TOBY KEITH AND LYNCHING

In right-wing mythology you can get rich in this country if you have talent and work hard. I have a two word answer to rebut that: Toby Keith. I love country music, but I loathe Toby Keith and other fakes who pose as country music artists. Keith's talent is sparse, at best, but what is worse is that the hate message he consistently puts out in what he calls "music." Now Keith is putting lynching to a beat. This article by Max Blumenthal is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Those who doubt the presence of racist undertones in Keith's "Beer For My Horses" should see the song's video. (The embed link to the video's Youtube version was disabled by Keith's record label so you have to click here to watch it). Cue ahead to 3:00 and watch as Keith intones, "We got too many gangsters doin' dirty deeds." The singer's words are not-so-subtly accompanied by the image of a swaggering black man sporting short dreads and baggy clothes. Thus the profile of Keith's ideal lynching candidate is revealed.

Keith's whirlwind publicity tour continues on July 30 with his appearance on CBS's Early Show, then sit-down interviews with Esquire Magazine and Us Weekly. The following week, Jay Leno will play host to another raucous rendition of "Beer For My Horses." Thanks to Keith and his unsuspecting hosts, lynching is becoming cool again.
_______

2008-07-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

July 28, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE RELIGION RACKET

I don't understand why people turn off their reasoning ability when they are involved with religion. It must be a strong desire to believe in magic. "Intelligent design" theorists try to put an intellectual gloss on religion, but it doesn't stand up. A belief that has been around a long time, but is even more prominent now, is "prosperity" theology. The snake oil salesmen will tell you that God wants you to be rich. Just pray enough, believe enough, and tithe enough and you too will be rich. Conversely, if you're poor, it must mean that God doesn't favor you. This article by Meg White is at http://www.buzzflash.com/:

There are two things that just shouldn't mix with religion: politics and money. But with President George W. Bush's reliance upon the evangelical Christian vote to get elected and some pastors' promises to believers that worshiping and giving to the church will bring them personal wealth, there's no shortage of examples of people who benefit greatly by combining twisted views of God and economics.

The Bible doesn't seem to square with either the evangelical notion of "prosperity theology" or Republican economic theory. Jesus tells his followers to give everything to the needy. He also says that we should pay our taxes, rendering unto Caesar (i.e., the government) what is his.

What would Jesus do? Well, none of us can say for sure, but I have a feeling he wouldn't advocate slashing social services for the poor and cutting taxes for the wealthy. And as much as he advocated helping the downtrodden, he wasn't passing around the collection plate himself.

2008-07-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

July 22, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

HEALTH CARE COSTS ARE PROBLEM, NOT SOCIAL SECURITY

A few months ago I had an "interview" with a guy representing the World Financial Group. They sell investment plans that are supposed to give you a good retirement fund. Somewhere along the way, of course, there was an attack on Social Security. According to the propaganda, we of the Baby Boom generation will bankrupt Social Security, or put an insufferable burden on younger workers who pay into the system. When you examine all the data you see that the claims are nonsense. Social Security is one of the best programs ever devised by the federal government and the only source of survival for many people. This article by economist Dean Baker looks at a right-wing ideologue named Peter Peterson who would like to destroy Social Security. The article is at www.commondreams.org:

Peterson has not been shy about using slippery logic to advance his agenda. For example, back in the 90’s he argued for cutting the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, which is tied to the consumer price index (CPI), based on the claim that the CPI substantially overstates the true rate of inflation. If Peterson’s claim about a CPI overstatement were true, then it would imply that incomes are rising far more rapidly than our projections show. Peterson’s CPI adjustment would mean that our children and grandchildren will be far richer than we could possibly imagine, because incomes are rising so rapidly. Similarly, the retirees for whom he wanted to cut benefits actually spent much of their lives in poverty. If incomes have been rising more rapidly than the official data show, then we must have been far poorer in the past than the data show.

In the same vein, Peterson supported the partial privatization of Social Security, based on assumptions on stock returns that were inconsistent with the profit growth projections of the Social Security trustees, and the price-to-earnings ratios that existed in the stock market at the time. In the push to cut Social Security and Medicare, Peterson does not feel the need to be bound by the truths of logic and arithmetic.

There is a fundamental point on which Peterson is correct. The long-term budget projections do show a horror story of enormous deficits. But these projections are not driven by aging and overly generous retirement programs. They are driven by projections that our private health care system, which already costs twice as much per person as the average for other rich countries, will get ever more inefficient through time. If we never fix our health care system, then we will face an economic disaster, which will include serious budget problems, since half of our health care is paid for through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

This reality would suggest the importance of reforming the health care system. Health care reform would mean confronting the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, as well as the doctors’ lobbies. These groups have serious power. That’s why Mr. Peterson prefers to stick with granny bashing.

2008-07-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

July 21, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

JUST WHAT ARE MCCAIN'S QUALIFICATIONS AGAIN?

John McCain has been in the Senate a long time. If you used that as a qualification for anything, then certain types of fungi would be qualified to be president. He got shot down in Vietnam and was a POW. How does that remotely qualify him for the presidency? Every time he opens his mouth McCain just proves we shouldn't let him anywhere near the Oval Office. In this column Frank Rich looks at the McCain campaign. The column is at www.nytimes.com:

Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated by whining about "a nation of whiners." The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings , no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s "mental recession," Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as "almost certainly" the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was "probably the most exploited worker in American history" since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the "billions" he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

2008-07-18T16:06:00.000-07:00

July 17, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE STRATEGY OF CAPTURED AGENCIES

Conservatives love to fulminate against "big government." But they have no problem with government that acts as a tool for their friends. For instance, you appoint people who are anti-environment to head up agencies charged with enforcing environmental regulations. Or you put a corporate lackey like Elaine Chao in charge of the Labor Department. The agency has dragged its feet repeatedly during Bush's term in investigating abuses against working people. This editorial is from The New York Times at www.nytimes.com:

President Bush has filled top posts across his administration with people who do not agree with the missions of their organizations. His Environmental Protection Agency has failed to protect the environment; his Justice Department has promoted injustice.

To lead the Department of Labor, Mr. Bush appointed Elaine Chao, who took office in 2001 arguing that states should be able to opt out of the federal minimum wage — a terrible idea that would drive down wages for the lowest-paid employees. For more than seven years, Ms. Chao has run a department that has tilted toward employers and failed to properly enforce labor laws.

"RANDOM" JURY SERVICE

Today I got my fourth jury summons from Fresno County in just eight years. Fresno County has a fairly sizable population. Granted, some of those people wouldn't be eligible for jury service due to age, physical handicaps, being too young, etc. But this is still astonishing, especially since most people I know have never gotten a jury summons.

I know we're supposed to feel "privileged" by jury service. I wonder, then, why you get threatened with jail if you don't follow their orders. Some privilege. I wonder why juries will slave away on lawsuits, only to have some elitist judge reduce or throw out the judgment. We saw that recently in a case involving a female basketball coach who sued California State University, Fresno, for sexual discrimination. And I wonder why employers are not required to pay your salary when you get shanghaied into jury service. You're magically supposed to make it on $15.00 a day.

This is just another example of why Fresno County wouldn't my first choice of places to live.

2008-07-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

July 17, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE INEQUALITY GAP

When George W. Bush sauntered off the stage at the latest summit he arrogantly crowed, "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." The United States is number one in too many bad categories. We do lead the world in contributing to greenhouse gases. We lead the world in military expenditures. We have an astonishing infant mortality rate for such a rich country. We rate well down the list for life expectancy, especially for African-Americans. There is something very wrong here. You can attribute much of it to our rotten free market economic system. This article by Leonard Doyle is at http://www.commondreams.org/:

The United States of America is becoming less united by the day. A 30-year gap now exists in the average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England. Huge disparities have also opened up in income, health and education depending on where people live in the US, according to a report published yesterday.

The American Human Development Index has applied to the US an aid agency approach to measuring well-being - more familiar to observers of the Third World - with shocking results. The US finds itself ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in survival of infants to age. Suicide and murder are among the top 15 causes of death and although the US is home to just 5 per cent of the global population it accounts for 24 per cent of the world’s prisoners.

Despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities.

2008-07-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

July 16, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

FREE MARKET ONLY WORKS FOR SOME

Right-wingers idolize the "free market." To hear them speak, you would think we lived in a virtual Garden of Eden before there was regulation of markets. Read a little history and you find out differently, of course, but history and reading are not trademarks of right-wing "thought." You really only have to go back to the Great Depression to see what a miserable failure free markets are. It took the interventions and innovations of the New Deal to save the United States economy. Right-wingers would rather spit about "socialism" than look at the real world. We're seeing the poison fruit of free market orthodoxy now: the bank crisis, the home mortgage crisis, the health care crisis, rocketing gasoline and food costs, and the incestuous relationship between big corporations and the federal government. This column by Peter G. Gosselin is at www.latimes.com:

Spurred by the continued housing crisis, turmoil in financial markets, spiking oil prices, disappearing jobs and shrinking retirement savings, the nation and its political leaders have begun to sour on the notion that the current market system is the key to a fair, stable and efficient society.

"We're at a hinge point," said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who helped craft President Clinton's market-friendly agenda during the 1990s. "The strong presumption in favor of markets, which has dominated public policy since the late 1970s, has been thrown very much into question."

Now, to a degree not seen in years, politicians and outside experts are looking with favor at more, not less, government involvement in the economy.

REGULATION IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY

Imagine, if you will, driving your car on roads and freeways with no rules. Everyone would do what they wanted. It would be survival of the fittest. There would be no pesky rules about speed limits and merging and stopping at lights or signs. It would be horrifying. But that is essentially what right-wingers want in the economy. We're supposed to believe that big corporations will police themselves and that the "market' will make them toe the line. It's absolute nonsense. What's more, it's a prescription for disaster. This column by Cenk Uygur is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Complete deregulation is an intellectually indefensible position. It is also the current Republican platform. We have been trained, and yes even brainwashed, into believing that the government is a bad thing and the less you have of it, the better. That is until of course your house is burning down, then all of a sudden government help -- in the form of the fire department -- seems like a pretty good idea.

The reason we have government is because it serves a role that we need in society. Police, fire department, public education, common defense and financial regulation of the markets. If you don't have a check on insider trading, the rich get richer and the average guy gets screwed. So, you need the cops of Wall Street. But this isn't just the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is every regulatory agency that watches over the financial industry to protect the interests of all of us.

Even Adam Smith realized the need for government regulation. And it is a perverse situation we find ourselves in that I even have to make the case for such fundamental and obvious points. But yet, here is the campaign for one of the major party candidates for president hiring as their top economic adviser the man who embodies this bloodlust for limitless deregulation. This is probably the one person who best represents all that is wrong with radical deregulation. His name is Phil Gramm.

2008-07-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

July 13, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

SEE HOW THEY WHINE

Today's Fresno Bee letters section had yet another whiny, poor pitiful me letter from a right-winger who thinks the country should be partitioned by county. He claims, without any sourcing, of course, that Bush won over 2,000 counties in the 2000 election, whereas Al Gore allegedly won 600 counties or so. Of course, Al Gore actually won more votes. The counties that supported Bush are mostly inhabited by prairie dogs and tumbleweeds.

The right-wing meme of late is that they are just terribly put upon. They can't practice their "Christian" beliefs. The gays are coming and abortion is legal, oh my! Heaven forbid they should pay any taxes that might possibly benefit someone else, especially if the someone else is disadvantaged somehow. How does that jibe with the basic tenet of Christianity called the Golden Rule? Oh, never mind.

The world would be a far better place without the selfish, me first, ignorant and bigoted philosophy called conservatism.

2008-07-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

July 10, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

ANOTHER RIGHT WING HISSY FIT

Yesterday I read a letter in The Fresno Bee by another anal-retentive right-winger upset that anyone would suggest banning fireworks. As anyone around here knows, fires have been blazing throughout California. The smoke from those fires has made bad air even worse. For people with asthma and other respiratory ailments, it has to be sheer misery.

You can always tell the prototypical nut job right-winger because they manage to slip in the word "liberal" somewhere and go on a rant about liberals denying them their freedoms. According to Mr. Brilliant, we want to ban guns and ban drilling and ban nuclear power plants and, now, even ban fireworks. Oh, the humanity!

If this guy represents right-wingers, I guess we can believe that right-wingers like dirty air, people getting slaughtered by guns, the oceans getting filled with toxic oil and other wastes from drilling, the despoliation of ANWR for oil that won't help us much at all, and nuclear plants, which are really like nuclear bombs ready to explode, in our very own neighborhoods. What visionaries they are!

On the other hand, they have no problem with interfering in people's personal lives, ripping up civil liberties, bankrupting the government, and starting immoral wars.

THE WORKING CLASS DESERVES A BREAK

A trend I've noticed over the past several years is that employers want you to possess world class skills, but they don't want to pay even decent wages and benefits. No matter how hard or well you work it's never quite enough. They find excuses to deny raises, take away benefits, or even outsource jobs. In the meantime, the richest people in the country are rolling in money. They whine about government regulation or about taxes while they live like kings. This commentary by Steven Greenhouse is at tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com:

In talking with workers--be they software engineers or hotel housekeepers, factory workers or freelancers--I often sensed a frustration, even an anger, that unfairness has muscled aside fairness in America in recent decades and especially in recent years, and it goes far beyond stratospheric C.E.O. salaries. Many workers are upset that their families have been sinking economically--median income for working-age households fell $2,375 from 2000 to 2006 (after accounting for inflation). For the typical worker, wages have inched up less than 1 percent since the most recent economic expansion began in November 2001, even as corporate profits have soared and productivity per worker has jumped more than 15 percent. And there's also widespread resentment that while middle-class and low-wage workers have been treading water, average income for the top 1 percent of households, averaging $1.1 million in annual income, has more than tripled over the past quarter century. The top 1 percent of household has more after-tax income than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

And I hardly need to point out that for the great majority of workers, the pain has grown only worse in recent months as fuel prices, food prices and foreclosures have soared.

2008-07-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

July 08, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

CARTER WAS RIGHT ABOUT ENERGY

It became popular in right-wing circles to suggest that the Carter administration was a massive failure and it took the "savior" Ronald Reagan to restore us to greatness. I know that I did better economically during the Carter administration. Reagan's supposed great economy wasn't all that great. One area where Jimmy Carter stands out is his vision about energy policy. The United States experienced its first oil shock in the 1970's. It should have been a wakeup call, but Ronald Reagan and right-wingers never liked to face a reality that means inconvenience or sacrifice. This article by Stephen Pizzo is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Have you forgotten what real leadership and real straight talk look and sound like? No wonder.

Well here's a refreshing refresher course. Back in 1977 the much maligned, President Jimmy Carter, showed genuine leadership and political courage, two traits almost entirely missing from today's "leaders." Following the Arab oil boycott of 1973, Carter took a cold, hard look at world oil supplies and declared them a national security threat just waiting to happen. He laid out a vision of what must be done, and done quickly to avoid just such a threat to America's robust, but excessive, lifestyle. Carter, as was his wonkish wont, laid out both his vision and his solutions in painstaking detail in a prime-time television address.

It was filled with hard truths and bitter pills, neither of which pampered Americans had (and still have) no use for and conservatives scorn as "defeatism" and "surrender." On a ship of fools it's always "full speed ahead -- and stop with the iceberg business! Yahooooooo."