August 28, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THE GROPER'S CALLOUS BUDGET CUTS

Passing California's annual budget has become an exercise in political gamesmanship. This year a few Republicans, being Republicans, were holding up the budget. It took some callous cuts by Governor Groper to finally get the budget passed. Republicans consistently prove themselves friendly to the rich and powerful while telling the rest of us to go to hell. This editorial is at www.latimes.com:

In the end, it still could have been a good state budget, despite its unnecessary two-month tardiness. It could have been a fair, though painful, step toward fiscal sanity. It could have been a lesson in balancing social and fiscal responsibility. It could have been forward-looking and smart. But it's not.

We take it as a given that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had to use his veto pen to slash more than $700 million to eliminate the budget's operational deficit and to pick up the two necessary Republican votes in the state Senate. Lean is good. But some cuts seem cruel and gratuitous jabs at California's most vulnerable.

A series of Times stories in 2005 revealed one shocking instance after another of conservators -- appointed by courts to protect the elderly and infirm -- using their positions of trust to instead exploit their often defenseless wards. The darkest possible nightmare for many aging Californians was coming true as they lost their property and their freedom to professional guardians with virtually unsupervised power. A series of legislative hearings forced Sacramento to confront the issue, and Schwarzenegger with great fanfare signed into law reforms to allow the courts to finally oversee the conservatorship industry.

THE REPREHENSIBLE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Having highly-paid flacks like public relations agencies wasn't enough for the rich and powerful and their corporate buddies. A few years ago the very rich conceived the idea of "think tanks." "Think tanks" spend their time putting together policy papers with a veneer of intellectualism to justify the system their funders want. Heritage is largely funded by that rich creep Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited his money (but never mind) and Joseph Coors of the Coors Brewing Company. According to Heritage, you aren't poor if you have some basic things such as a microwave, a color TV, or a stereo. Boy, I feel better now! This commentary by Bob Higgins is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

In all his quoting of vague "government sources," "Senior Fellow" Rector doesn't mention wage stagnation, the continually rising cost of living in all areas, outsourcing and offshoring of jobs in all sectors of the economy, community crippling layoffs, pension defaults, natural disasters, catastrophic illnesses, death, war and a host of other legitimate reasons why good, honest, working people have fallen into poverty yet still have that embarrassing dishwasher in their kitchen and still reside in the three bedroom house with a patio that they lived in before their jobs were shipped off to Timbuktu.

There may be a difference between the face of poverty in Dorothea Lange's hauntingly beautiful "Migrant Mother" from 1940 at the top of this rant and the modern version in this new century but I doubt it, you have to look at the eyes, close up, and personal to see, to know the despair.

I don't know, Maybe "Senior Fellow" Rector hasn't heard about those things, yeah that's probably it.