I'm stuck in Folsom Prison..

I think this is amusing, but not really. I;m certain this idea has been kicked around.

‘Get Back To Work Camps’ Are The Linchpin Of Rick Perry’s New Jobs Program

Rick Perry, Texas governor and GOP Presidential contender, announced the linchpin of his jobs program today.  “Get Back To Work Camps,” he said, “will assure food and shelter for all our citizens, regardless of economic standing.”  Under Perry’s plan, debt would become a criminal offense, much as it was in Victorian England.


Those convicted of the crime of being in default on debt could, if employed, work out a repayment plan suitable to the courts and their creditors.  The defendant’s paychecks would be rendered directly to the court, with payments being made to creditors first.  Defendants would be allowed to keep 25 percent of their pay, after taxes.  However, those convicted of default without sufficient income would be sentenced to “Get Back To Work Camps.”  Here, various private companies will set up shop to utilize the labor.  Debtors might be assigned to an on-site factory or might be assigned to offsite work crews.


The private contractors will keep the camps open, providing each debtor with adequate food and shelter.  Debtor’s will be paid at minimum wage, with the costs of food and housing deducted from their pay.  The remaining money will go to pay off their debt.
Once the debt is satisfied, debtors will be free to join society with a clean financial slate.
Perry also announced that, under a Perry Presidency, personal bankruptcy would be outlawed.  Only corporations would be able to restructure debt.

Take a look at Paul Krugman's latest treatise on the economy too:

Op-Ed Columnist

The Fatal Distraction

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”
One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result.
Ever since the acute phase of the financial crisis ended, policy discussion in Washington has been dominated not by unemployment, but by the alleged dangers posed by budget deficits. Pundits and media organizations insisted that the biggest risk facing America was the threat that investors would pull the plug on U.S. debt. For example, in May 2009 The Wall Street Journal declared that the “bond vigilantes” were “returning with a vengeance,” telling readers that the Obama administration’s “epic spending spree” would send interest rates soaring.
The interest rate when that editorial was published was 3.7 percent. As of Friday, as I’ve already mentioned, it was only 2 percent.
I don’t mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising health-care costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running right now — deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are no threat at all.
And by obsessing over a nonexistent threat, Washington has been making the real problem — mass unemployment, which is eating away at the foundations of our nation — much worse.
Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers.
And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.
O.K., I know what the usual suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and higher taxes are holding businesses back. But this is just a right-wing fantasy. Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a lack that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even in the picture.
For example, when McClatchy Newspapers recently canvassed a random selection of small-business owners to find out what was hurting them, not a single one complained about regulation of his or her industry, and few complained much about taxes. And did I mention that profits after taxes, as a share of national income, are at record levels?
So short-run deficits aren’t a problem; lack of demand is, and spending cuts are making things much worse. Maybe it’s time to change course?
Which brings me to President Obama’s planned speech on the economy.
I find it useful to think in terms of three questions: What should we be doing to create jobs? What will Republicans in Congress agree to? And given that political reality, what should the president propose?
The answer to the first question is that we should have a lot of job-creating spending on the part of the federal government, largely in the form of much-needed spending to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Oh, and we need more aid to state and local governments, so that they can stop laying off schoolteachers.
But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. They will oppose anything Mr. Obama proposes, even if it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, especially if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically.
This reality makes the third question — what the president should propose — hard to answer, since nothing he proposes will actually happen anytime soon. So I’m personally prepared to cut Mr. Obama a lot of slack on the specifics of his proposal, as long as it’s big and bold. For what he mostly needs to do now is to change the conversation — to get Washington talking again about jobs and how the government can help create them.
For the sake of the nation, and especially for millions of unemployed Americans who see little prospect of finding another job, I hope he pulls it off.

Is there any question now that we're under attack?  And not from terrorists without, but the corporate terrorists from within!  We must speak out, and we must not stop until our voices are heard.  America is being systematically dismantled by those who would sell it off for the value of its parts including its people and not what it stands for, and what it means to everyone in the world. 

Will we continue to not only allow this behavior, but to encourage it by not challenging it?

Quo Vadimus?

And so it goes:

Quo Vadimus?

Quo Vadimus dear readers? Personally I don't know, but all the signs point to a trend I don't want to think about. The defections have begun.

From Nom defector Louis Marinelli, to today's guest commentator Mike Lofgren via Truthout.com people of conscience, people with at least one scruple, are abandoning the GOP, and I have to wonder what the results will be. Lofgren is right, both parties suck. They're both addicted to the flow of money necessary to get elected to political office in this country today. I have to wonder if it's even possible anymore for a candidate to get elected without it. Wouldn't that be a miraculous occurrence?

To live long enough to either see a candidate get elected without corporate support, or see one who was supported fully by responsible corporations who donated and then kept their hands off the process.

What a dream.

But here's a little taste of the nightmare we're really living:  
 Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult Saturday 3 September 2011 by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis (Photo: Carolyn Tiry / Flickr) 
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" 
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma. But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages. The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization. Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!" It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant. In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases. The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights. Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way: "Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery." A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980). The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'" Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives. This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters. This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious. Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students. This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting. You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear. It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate. I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder. The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking. What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3] While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists. How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme? You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash. It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest. Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition. As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing: 1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass. Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs? Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero. When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire. All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma. And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." 2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives. A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts. And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious. Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic. The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire. 3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter." The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism? It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets. Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires. The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War. It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord. Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split. Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.) It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett. I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one. If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked. During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined. If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power. Footnotes: [1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people. [2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen [3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base. [4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates. [5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid "Rand."

I do not fear for just our country, I fear for our future.

Quo Vadimus my friends?

And so it goes:

Gaining sight of it

Blogger has a new dashboard, not sure about this. It is change after all, and people my age don't do change well. Speaking of age, I aged several years this week. Let's see if I can recap the last 36 hrs:
Yoga Class kicked my ass
I ran around looking for a box to give a friend one of my pots in, and found it 20 minutes before we were to meet for lunch.
Flurries of emails from the executor about the estate, also tried unsuccessfully to reach the attorney about my real estate matters.
Finalized the offer on the house and sent it off to the agent.
Spent 2.5 hrs at a lunch date talking a friend off a metaphorical ledge. She just needs to stand up for herself, there's nothing really wrong with her.
Accepted a position to tech direct the next two productions at the college, and found out the lighting designer is someone I have no feeling for but who apparently has a deep and abiding dislike of me...this should be fun.
Spent martini night with friends and their friends, it was quite fun, not too much gin, but rather just enough.
Made a dinner date for Monday with my old boss.
Rode the bike a bit, only made ten miles before turning back.
made some pots
went to the new house to look around and get the vibe of the neighborhood a bit better
took my brother and his wife shopping and ran some errands
Cooked a huge dinner for 12, Grilled Crab Legs, corn on the cob,Zucchini corn fritters, fresh bread, a salad with a killer raspberry pecan vinaigrette I made myself. Then two pies and ice cream for dessert. It was a last hoo-rah around the pool, we're closing it in the morning.
Fixed the garage door opener, and washed and waxed the car.
Mowed the lawn

Oh and yesterday the suburbs were under siege! I was cleaning the house and my brother calls and says "Go inside lock the doors and stay in there!" Ever the skeptic I said "What the fuck for?" "There's a criminal on the loose in the neighborhood, he robbed a liquor store and the police were chasing him and he bailed out in our neighborhood!" Now, I am not one to be patient, nor very tolerant of...oh...let's call it bullshit, and this case was no exception. "Fuck him I have things to do." I said, and went on about my business. The mood I was in if he'd stumbled in the house, he'd have been outside begging the cops to take him to jail ten minutes later. They found him last night in the next city south of here.

The couple I met at martini;s last night was fun, one of them wasn't very talkative, but they were friendly. I think he thought I thought his bf was hot....he wasn't altogether wrong. Alas, my days of being a home wrecker are behind me. Dammit. I did and do wish I had had the opportunity to bring the ex. He would have fit in perfectly and would also have been a buffer for me to lean on as well.   

Enough about me, let's talk about self-entitled assholes who think anyone who is in need is a burden on society not someone we should help.
via joemygod.com
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers." - Matthew Vadum, writing for American Thinker. One would have hoped way back in the 70's that some of that enlightenment stuff would have paid off and people in general would be a little m ore compassionate and caring. Obviously I'm delusional but here we have what I believe to be a very common mindset today. That anyone who can't get a decent job, and can't get a decent education, and as very little chance to succeed should be left to their own devices, that they shouldn't be helped in any way. It's apparent that we've entered a new Victorianism without Victoria obviously, but with those conservative and misguided mores intact. How in the fuck did we get to this place? What did we as a society, or these people's educators teach them that gave them the notion that they, (mostly white upper middle class folks I might add) are entitled to a good and decent life and the lower classes are not. That these lowly peons who dare to want a voice in how this country is run are unconscionably presumptuous.

To which I can only respond...huh?

BTW Erik Pappas is a P.O.S.

And so it goes:
Let's do hgf while we're at it shall we?

How does this happen

Monday's may be a no blog day for me.  It appears my schedule that day will keep me busy all semester.

So, today let's look at Michelle Bachmann and her insistence that not only was Hurricane Irene a message from God, but that we should  explore for oil wherever we can find it and let the environment fend for itself. i.e. "Let's drill in the everglades."

Also, Bryan Fisher if the AFA wants to re-criminalize Sodomy. Says there's no reason it can't be a felony again.

And the worst news of all this week... Michael Vick got a 100 million dollar contract.

And so it goes:

the road to hell

i truly meant to  post hgf earlier, but i was busy, then i had to go to work for a while.  if for no other reason than to demonstrate the power of handsome young men.  they can get me to do so many things mere mortals cannot.

So without further ado:

Know nothing

We've managed to politicize everything, and in turn managed to reduce everything to ridiculous terms.

Take for example the common lightbulb.

Thomas Edison invented the damn thing in 1878. He invented the phonograph in 1877.

Do we still use wax cylinders to record sound? No! We have electronic technology, and manipulate the sound digitally.

So why, pray tell, would we continue in this age of resource management, to use the exact same bulb in it's 1878 form? Shouldn't we apply our technological advancement and knowledge to the electric light?

True, the light from some of the new bulbs sucks. But hat can be overcome with a bit of time. And some of the led's are quite good now.

We have choices in regard to light source, and we should exercise them. No nothing is cheap anymore, and yes we, being humans fear change, but seriously folks. It's not the democrats fault that we need to move to other sources of light and that it needs to be mandated.

It's the Republicans fault...lol.

No, not everything needs to be legislated, and it was probably a bit much to require the change by law. Simply require the manufacturers to make more efficient bulbs and let things sort themselves out would likely have made the Republiicans happier, at least we could say that the market was making a change that was necessary and not that we were making everyone do this by law, but they didn't.

But turning the sommon light bulb into a source of derision like I saw this morning on MSNBC.com, just means one thing. We're fools and misdirection is the easiest way to fool a fool, or a lot of fools.

and so it goes:

What's the matter with Kansas?

Adults who aren't smart enough to leave kids alone and let them be kids, mostly. There's a whole litany of other things wrong with Kansas, but that's our focus today.

What did these kids do wrong? Nothing!Someone said "There's a time and a place for this kind of stuff."..AND IT'S CALLED COLLEGE.

I love each and every one of them for doing what comes natural.

they were kids being kids,yet here in Kansas we have to turn some innocent prank into a moral dilemma.

Fucking Kansas.

Bethany suspends golfers after racy picture
83 Comments
BY Tony Adame
The Wichita Eagle
Photos
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Golfers on the Bethany College men's team posed for a racy photo.


A racy photo has the Bethany College men's golf team in hot water.


All 15 members of the team at the small, Lutheran school in Lindsborg posed naked for an unofficial team picture, with strategically placed golf clubs to cover their genitals.


Athletic director and golf coach Jon Daniels suspended the team for three tournaments — two that would have occurred on the same day — because of the picture.


Daniels was caught by surprise when someone e-mailed him the photo.


"I had no idea they were doing it," Daniels said. "After one of (the golfers) put it on Facebook, then it got sent to me.


"I've been around a long time and I think this is a case of young people who just don't think beyond the moment and don't realize who they're hurting."


Daniels said the team took another picture, clothed, before they decided to go with the one that got them in trouble.


"Until someone sat them down and explained that they did something wrong, they didn't have any idea," Daniels said. "But I think they understand now."


The Swedes will miss tournaments on Sept. 12 and 13, when Daniels planned to send split squads to the Evangel Tournament in Springfield, Mo., and the Central Christian Tournament in McPherson. They'll also miss the Oklahoma Baptist Tournament on Sept. 19 at Shawnee, Okla.


Team captain Jack Hiscock told KAKE News that the team would appeal the suspension to the school's president, Dr. Scott D. Miller.


Bethany has won 11 of the last 15 KCAC championships and competes in the NAIA.


"It put me in a bad spot as the athletic director and the golf coach, and it put the reputation of the program in a bad spot," Daniels said. "This is a scholar-athlete team, a team that always wins and is nationally ranked... but something like this makes all of that forgotten."


Read more: http://www.kansas.com/2011/08/22/1983841/bethany-suspends-golfers-after.html#ixzz1VwcLihZ7

and so it goes:

I dint mean to

but I did.  I skipped yesterdays post.

School has started, it's getting hot and I still can't find a house to buy.  Well I've found two actually.  But they both have problems.  Nothing insurmountable, I think, but they're both a lot of work.

One i love, but it's problem is expensive and could cause big problems if  not attended to.   The other I like, and it's probably the better investment, but it's in a place I'm not sure I want to live.

Perhaps the right one is still out there waiting for me to find it, or it to find me.  We'll see.

And Will Smith seems to be single again.  Hey Will!  I'm single too!

And so it goes:

 

Speaking of voices in the wilderness

Paul Krugman has been telling us for years and we've never listened, not one time. 


via NYT-

Paul Krugman


Has market turmoil left you feeling afraid? Well, it should. Clearly, the economic crisis that began in 2008 is by no means over.
But there’s another emotion you should feel: anger. For what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it.
For more than a year and a half — ever since President Obama chose to make deficits, not jobs, the central focus of the 2010 State of the Union address — we’ve had a public conversation that has been dominated by budget concerns, while almost ignoring unemployment. The supposedly urgent need to reduce deficits has so dominated the discourse that on Monday, in the midst of a market panic, Mr. Obama devoted most of his remarks to the deficit rather than to the clear and present danger of renewed recession.
What made this so bizarre was the fact that markets were signaling, as clearly as anyone could ask, that unemployment rather than deficits is our biggest problem. Bear in mind that deficit hawks have been warning for years that interest rates on U.S. government debt would soar any day now; the threat from the bond market was supposed to be the reason that we must slash the deficit now now now. But that threat keeps not materializing. And, this week, on the heels of a downgrade that was supposed to scare bond investors, those interest rates actually plunged to record lows.
What the market was saying — almost shouting — was, “We’re not worried about the deficit! We’re worried about the weak economy!” For a weak economy means both low interest rates and a lack of business opportunities, which, in turn, means that government bonds become an attractive investment even at very low yields. If the downgrade of U.S. debt had any effect at all, it was to reinforce fears of austerity policies that will make the economy even weaker.
So how did Washington discourse come to be dominated by the wrong issue?
Hard-line Republicans have, of course, played a role. Although they don’t seem to truly care about deficits — try suggesting any rise in taxes on the rich — they have found harping on deficits a useful way to attack government programs.
But our discourse wouldn’t have gone so far off-track if other influential people hadn’t been eager to change the subject away from jobs, even in the face of 9 percent unemployment, and to hijack the crisis on behalf of their pre-existing agendas.
Check out the opinion page of any major newspaper, or listen to any news-discussion program, and you’re likely to encounter some self-proclaimed centrist declaring that there are no short-run fixes for our economic difficulties, that the responsible thing is to focus on long-run solutions and, in particular, on “entitlement reform” — that is, cuts in Social Security and Medicare. And when you do encounter such a person, you should be aware that people like that are a major reason we’re in so much trouble.
For the fact is that right now the economy desperately needs a short-run fix. When you’re bleeding profusely from an open wound, you want a doctor who binds that wound up, not a doctor who lectures you on the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle as you get older. When millions of willing and able workers are unemployed, and economic potential is going to waste to the tune of almost $1 trillion a year, you want policy makers who work on a fast recovery, not people who lecture you on the need for long-run fiscal sustainability.
Unfortunately, giving lectures on long-run fiscal sustainability is a fashionable Washington pastime; it’s what people who want to sound serious do to demonstrate their seriousness. So when the crisis struck and led to big budget deficits — because that’s what happens when the economy shrinks and revenue plunges — many members of our policy elite were all too eager to seize on those deficits as an excuse to change the subject from jobs to their favorite hobbyhorse. And the economy continued to bleed.
What would a real response to our problems involve? First of all, it would involve more, not less, government spending for the time being — with mass unemployment and incredibly low borrowing costs, we should be rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.
The usual suspects will, of course, denounce such ideas as irresponsible. But you know what’s really irresponsible? Hijacking the debate over a crisis to push for the same things you were advocating before the crisis, and letting the economy continue to bleed.

hgf and perry too

I keep telling you and telling you..do you listen? Nah!

I've known bloggers to simply give up. To end their blogs and walk away. Why? Because no one is heeding their message. And who can blame them?

Lemmings that we are, we seem bent on following our "Leaders" off that cliff that WE ALL CAN SEE. And why? Because we can't seem to be able to think for ourselves unless it's Verizon or AT&T, or netflix, or premium cable, or Old navy or H&M. The big questions go unanswered.

Why, you ask? Well good, because I'm about to tell you.

Our education system is broken. We have at least one entire generation that has no concept of how our government works. Most don't even understand Judicial, Executive, and Legislative. Let alone how a bill becomes law and what if anything they can do to influence the outcome. And sadly most don't even care.

Now in their defense, most do agree that our education system needs to be fixed, but that's mostly out of their memory that history class was boring, not that we've become this nation that thinks that turning out automatons who know math and science is the answer.

How can we create an effective education system (which is what we need to do, start from scratch) when the parties involved don't understand that the whole person is what needs to be developed. There is more to the human experience than numbers and facts. Understanding the inner workings of people and how they think, why they think what they do, and if they think at all, is basic to an ability to comprehend how to reason one's way through any situation.

So, the Arts, Psychology, Humanities of all stripes are essential to a complete education and we will not ever be able to begin to repair the damage that's been done to the existing system until we understand that.

Unfortunately this takes one vital ingredient. Money.

The GOP isn't the least bit interested in becoming the party of the common man, it's goal is to make people think that's what it is, but in truth what it wants to do is convince people to be proud of their ignorance.

To be thrilled that insurance company flunkies get to decide whether they live or die based on how much it costs to keep them alive.  Why?  because "A healthy, educated populace is difficult to govern."  And if we start asking hard questions and demanding cogent answers the Rick Perry's of this world won't be able to deliver the goods.

Perry, our latest candidate for the GOP nomination, gets all too well the notion that simple short sound bites like, "I mean, printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous—or treason, in my opinion.” do more to inflame the misunderstandings between the haves and have nots when it comes to education than any other political tool he could use. He wants people "riled up," he needs them to be "riled up" so he can exploit their weaknesses. And to do the bidding of his handlers.

That's why starving the government of capital at a time when it needs to be spending money to help its citizens is such a worthwhile goal if you want to privatize...well...everything.

This makes more rich people rich, and makes the division of the classes even wider.

But let's take a look at what Alan Sloan of Fortune magazine has to say on the subject of hijacking one issue to use it as support for another:


American idiots: How Washington is destroying the economy
By Allan Sloan, senior editor-at-large August 18, 2011: 5:00 AM ET
What's ailing us? It's not just unemployment. It's not just Europe's debt woes. And, no, it's not Wall Street this time. It's the takeover of the economic debate by fanatics who are up to no good. Fix that -- and maybe you fix the economy.
FORTUNE -- What the hell is going on?
Standard & Poor's, the bond-rating agency, downgrades the U.S., and the world trembles. The markets here go nuts on the first trading day after the downgrade, losing $1 trillion in value. European Union finance chiefs are playing Whac-a-Mole with members' debt problems. And England … England was literally burning.
Only three short years ago we were all terrified when our financial system was on the brink of disaster after Lehman Brothers went broke in September of 2008. Those scary times seemed to have disappeared in the spring of 2009. But now those fears are back -- and things are even scarier, the stock market's "green" days notwithstanding.
Our current mess is different from the Lehman-related horror because it stems primarily from politics, not economics. The previous fear-fest came about because Lehman's bankruptcy disrupted financial markets in unanticipated ways. Today's crisis was completely avoidable. You can blame it directly on the fools who brought our country to the brink of defaulting on its debts in the name of saving us from … I'm not sure what. Yes, the Tea Party types bear primary responsibility -- but they couldn't have done it without the cowardice and incompetence of the Obama administration, which let things get way out of hand. This whole fiasco just enrages me. And it ought to enrage anyone who wants the U.S. to act like a real country rather than some third-rate failed state run by fanatical factions that hate one another.
So why is today scarier than 2008-09? Because this time not only have we got troubled financial institutions to deal with, but we have serious, substantial countries facing possible default on their debts. Including, heaven help us, the U.S.
Things were already bad because of fear and financial fragility afflicting Europe. But the problems took a quantum leap because of fallout from Standard & Poor's totally justifiable Aug. 5 downgrade of U.S. long-term debt. The U.S. economy was already listless enough, with gross domestic product barely growing -- and maybe even shrinking -- plus record long-term unemployment. (One telling statistic: The percentage of U.S. adults with jobs is down to 58.1%, from 64.7% in 2000, according to the St. Louis Fed. That, my friends, isn't good -- see chart below.) The fear, loathing, and political divisiveness are going to make things worse, not better.


So what he's saying is that the inmates are running the asylum and we, meaning the ineffectual Obama Administration, has done nothing to call attention to that, nor to stop it.

If Barack Obama really wanted to lead us the manufactured crisis of the debt ceiling was a golden opportunity. Sometimes leading means that you have to make tough decisions about what's best and then take whatever steps are necessary to make those decisions come to fruition. If he'd had the courage to step up and do that, to invoke the 14th amendment and simply solve the debt ceiling crisis himself he'd be a hero because we likely wouldn't have had our credit rating downgraded (yes it's a very small difference from AAA to AA+ but it's perception that counts) and though the nutcases in the Tea Party would still be naysayers because "he hadn't allowed the democratic process to unfold." (and you know that's what they'd say) in the end he'd be proven right. But he didn't do that! He slunk around and played theater with them, and bad theater at that, and in the end all but caved in to their demands.

He's a huge disappointment, and seems not to understand at all what it means to be Presidential.

But why do bloggers such as myself keep saying these things over and over when it never seems to help?  Because there has to be some voice of reason in the wilderness.  Because it's our duty as citizens of the United States to stand up and challenge our elected officials.  Because, hopefully, in the end they'll take some notice of  what we're saying and what needs to be accomplished to move this country forward.

Unfortunately, we're so broken in so many ways that most of don't really understand how it is that our  government functions...and given our poor leadership it's unlikely that most will ever have any interest in finding out.


And so it goes:

Fools and our money

Last week an old man who comes into the grocery engaged me, as usual in political conversation. Now, I guess I'm a bit naive, because his notions have always been benign but with a slightly liberal bent, so when he recommended book I went to the library and got a copy of "The 5000 Year Leap."

I got two pages in when I realized this was a conservative manifesto written by a Mormon who contends that Americans can only lead when they're "virtuous and morally strong" read, zombie-like believers in the American God. (You know the kind white guy with a beard they always paint when they're referring to that guy who was born and bred in the middle east.)

The book goes back today. But that old man will stop his little political diatribes I guarantee Assuming we agreed about our political ideals by the things he'd already said and since when we we're talking he said something about government spending and I said, "You've seen that bumper sticker that says "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out off other people's money." Haven't you? He had. I said, "Well, the problem with capitalism is that you never run out of other people's money."

I doubt he'll be bringing up politics again.

But speaking of fools here's a great little piece about Dam Brownback:

Sam Brownback's right turns shock and appall New York Times
Posted by David Martin on Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 8:02 AM

Sam Brownback is accused of grandstanding.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s brand of conservatism has become an object of curiosity at The New York Times.

Last month, the newspaper cited his decision to ice the Kansas Arts Commission as an example of the extreme austerity measures that states are taking. On Sunday, an editorial in the Times called Brownback foolish, indulgent and partisan — all before it reached the first period!

The editorial addressed Brownback’s decision to return a $31.5 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The grant related to the federal health-care reform that conservatives liken to a tumor of evil wrapped in pus-colored gauze.

Before Brownback developed a case of grant winner’s remorse, the Kansas Insurance Department was planning to use the money to design and implement a Web-based health-insurance exchange. Exchanges are supposed to help individuals and businesses shop for private health plans when the law goes into effect in 2014. (The law, commonly known as the Affordable Care Act, is being challenged in the courts.)

But there will be no innovation of this variety on Brownback’s watch. The governor cited the “uncertainty” of the federal government’s ability to meet its obligations as his reason for returning the grant.

The Times thinks Brownback is pissing away an opportunity. The editorial mocked his worries about Washington’s ability to pay its bills, noting that as a U.S. senator, he voted for the tax cuts and war spending that have contributed mightily to the nation’s deficit habit.

Brownback’s first impulse was not to grandstand. In December, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger said Brownback wanted her to proceed with the planning for an insurance exchange.

But hard-liners pressured Brownback to return the money. “This administration should be fighting with every fiber to stop implementation of Obamacare,” state Rep. Charlotte O’Hara, an Overland Park Republican, told Secretary of State Kris Kobach on his Internet radio program, according to a report in The Topeka Capital-Journal.

House Speaker Mike O’Neal felt that O’Hara’s remarks were intemperate. He removed her from a legislative committee on health issues. His actions suggested a man who thinks that when the federal government plops $31.5 million on a tree stump, you put the money in your sack and slink back to Middle Earth.

But once the governor refused the grant money, O’Neal fell into line and started complaining about federal mandates and attached strings.

So, governor, your objection to Obamacare has been noted. Today it only cost the state’s IT professionals the chance for meaningful work.

And so it goes:

The bitter with the sweet

I think I might be just about to dive in the deep end head first on more than one count.

I found out something this afternoon I shouldn't know about a house I'm looking at because i ran into a chatty neighbor when I was there looking at it...again.  So maybe Boo Radleys house is the one.

Then of course  I found out I've spent all the money in my checking account because I didn't account for an automatic withdrawal.  Fuck!!!

Tomorrow is already a whirl with transferring funds, figuring out where my damn extra checks are in the storage, which makes me mad at myself, because i should have kept them out so I could get to them, and then getting dinner started, (it's brisket it's wonderful but it takes forever), and then meeting my broker so we can look at this house again.

The other jump I think I might be in the mood to make is into love.  He's awful nice, and he, for reasons that faileth human understanding, seems to think I'm sweet.  Now there's a guy one should keep around if he's delusional enough to think that.

And so it goes:

The future is now

So now THIS is running for President:

anyone with sense should be afraid.

Too much going on during this vacation.  Too many decisions to make too much to get done and as usual no really challenging choices. 

Getting old is boring right now.  I'm needing a change...maybe lots of them.

And so it goes:

Speaking of trends

• By: Associated Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia (AP) - Sherlock Holmes' first adventure has been removed from sixth-grade reading lists in a central Virginia county.
Brette Stevenson, a parent of a Henley Middle School student, had complained that "A Study in Scarlet" is derogatory toward Mormons.
The Daily Progess (http://bit.ly/oRCjig) reports that the Albemarle County School Board voted Thursday night to remove the book. A committee commissioned to study the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel said in a report that it's not age-appropriate for sixth-graders.
The book includes a flashback to 1847 Utah that recounts the actions of a Mormon community when a non-Mormon man wants to marry the daughter of one of its members.
Stevenson said she's pleased with the decision.

This is where unreasonable people take the phrase "politically correct."  It's yet another indication of the inherent stupidity of Americans.

And so it goes:

Whoda thunk Sweets was this sweet.