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I PROMISED I WOULD NOT COMMENT ON THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH LAST NIGHT

ABOVE PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE WHITEHOUSE: President Barack Obama addresses a Joint Session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Sept. 8, 2011. Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner are seated behind the President. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

But I am not going to be like the Republicans who signed some asinine pledge and I will just say what is necessary at this time. I think that the President’s speech was superb, almost confrontational and still not devoid of that Obama willingness to compromise…It is disheartening to see how President Obama and Democrats in general have allowed the Republicans to dictate the agenda.

It makes no difference to any politician what we…the people think at this point…we are emphatically against cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and touching Social Security is not even in our radar. We are in agreement, at least the majority of us Americans that there has to be substantial increases in taxes on the wealthier and the corporations and that this business of cutting the deficit is not a priority at this time when our economy is in shambles. The President thought that it was a BIG program but most of us don’t think it is big enough.

Unfortunately, Republicans have proven how they think. Small. Petty. In their own political interests. They have shown they will do everything they can – including holding our economy back – in their obsessive drive to make President Obama a one-term president – and seize both houses of Congress.

Today, as I do every day, I received more than a dozen e-mails requesting donations. I added it up and if I were to donate to each politician running for office, each cause célèbre and each organization that has requested I would be shedding out over $250.00…and that is for one day.

Of course I will vote to re-elect President Obama…I consider the alternatives…having a Teabagger Fundamentalist-science denier, homophobic and middle class destroyer in the White House doesn’t set very well with me.

But what I am not is enthusiastic nor am I going to go out of my way like I did in the last elections…if the Republicans win then so be it…it is because the American people deserve it and I can’t think of a better punishment for their stupidity…that is if they vote for these radical extremist right wingers…that remains to be seen.

They won’t denounce their extremism; they won’t admonish their crazy ideology…Why?

The reason is clear; most Republicans harbor the same ideologies only they have never been crazy enough to divulge them in mixed company. Most Republicans basically agree with every far-out, extremist views of what our country should be and the role of government.

When you have as your icon someone like Reagan who said that government was too big, couldn’t do anything right and that government is the problem…that is the foundation of the tea party. The Teabaggers see the function of government as one to enforce morality and to police our bedrooms and our wombs (those of us who have them, others like me, my penis)

It is not surprising then that the Tea Bag Party has taken over the GOP…with their blessings for the most part. It goes without saying that there are other underlying currents as well: xenophobia, homophobia, racism and religious fanaticism; the Teabaggers own all of these.

I am going to have to go out on a limb here and trust the American people…that good, kind, amply generous and compassionate people that have for so many years made this nation the number one power in the world and one that most foreigners envy and would like to live in. I seriously doubt there would be many people in other lands who would like to come to America if it is changed like Republicans want or taken over by right-wing, religious fanatics; I am going to place my hopes in the ability to do the right thing by the majority of America come next elections. I am somewhat encouraged when I see the likes of Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell defeated, or a Wisconsin grassroots revolt.

If you were to follow Republican talking points you would think that President Obama actually increased spending; if you are to believe their lies you would also get the impression that it was President Obama with “his” stimulus that helped get us deeper into an economic mess.

There are two things to keep in mind here and let it be clear that President Obama actually reduced spending. From the look of figures it was Bush who went overboard on the spending. Then the stimulus is a stinking dead herring; to put it bluntly: the wealthy Wall Street wolves got the money while the American people got zilch. Therefore, one has to conclude that one, the Wall Street wolves got rewarded for sinking the economy and two the stimulus was at the very best anemic…it should have been much bigger.

Why don’t we take a look at these charts from Dave Johnson and compare the Bush spending with Obama’s?

Government spending increased dramatically under Bush. It has not increased much under Obama. Note that this chart does not reflect any spending cuts resulting from deficit-cutting deals.

We can also look at the deficit and it follows pretty much in the same lines…the Republicans are lying…no other verb or word can describe what they are saying:

Notes, this chart includes Clinton's last budget year for comparison.

The numbers in these two charts come from Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2012. They are just the amounts that the government spent and borrowed, period, Anyone can go look then up. People who claim that Obama "tripled the deficit" are either misled or are trying to mislead.

And then there is the reality of the stimulus…no band aid, no sugar coating, no pretense here…the Republicans have to live with this one as one of their biggest fibs that the stimulus didn’t work.

In this chart, the RED lines on the left side -- the ones that keep doing DOWN -- show what happened to jobs under the policies of Bush and the Republicans. We were losing lots and lots of jobs every month, and it was getting worse and worse. The BLUE lines -- the ones that just go UP -- show what happened to jobs when the stimulus was in effect. We stopped losing jobs and started gaining jobs, and it was getting better and better. The leveling off on the right side of the chart shows what happened as the stimulus started to wind down: job creation leveled off at too low a level.

It looks a lot like the stimulus reversed what was going on before the stimulus.

Conclusion: THE STIMULUS WORKED BUT WAS NOT ENOUGH!

More False Things

These are just three of the false things that everyone "knows." Some others are (click through): Obama bailed out the banks, businesses will hire if they get tax cuts, health care reform cost $1 trillion, Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme or is "going broke", government spending "takes money out of the economy."

Why This Matters

These things really matter. We all want to fix the terrible problems the country has. But it is so important to know just what the problems are before you decide how to fix them. Otherwise the things you do to try to solve those problems might just make them worse. If you get tricked into thinking that Obama has made things worse and that we should go back to what we were doing before Obama -- tax cuts for the rich, giving giant corporations and Wall Street everything they want -- when those are the things that caused the problems in the first place, then we will be in real trouble.

Arguably, the stimulus was directed to benefit the banks, Wall Street and the very wealthy; it was not enough because it excluded the middle class and the poor. While all the Wall Street fat cats were carrying off our stimulus money in wheelbarrows, the general population was feeling the effects in terms of job losses and house foreclosures. But let’s keep it in perspective, shall we? And realize that it was basically a directive initiated and carried out by the Bush administration and it extended itself into the first part of the Obama administration.

To claim that Obama’s stimulus didn’t work is ludicrous because it wasn’t Obama’s to begin with and it wasn’t enough either. I think these Republicans better start checking facts and figures and abandon this effort to confuse and misinformed the voters. Voters are fed up with their lies…those who believe in them are becoming fewer and fewer and hopefully by the time next election comes around there will be enough of us to vote the bastards out of office and totally humiliate them…we need to put them in their place where they belong…we need to view them for what they are: extremist right wing fanatic, ideologues and traitors.

SOURCE: http://critterscrap.blogspot.com/

CHARTS: at Campaign For America's Future

PHOTO SOURCE: http://tenthltr2u.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/budget-cuts-kill-the-middle-class/dave-johnson/

Are we ever going to be free from all this nonsense these religious fanatics want to force on the rest of us?

Governor Perry, aspiring to get the nomination for President is trying to ingratiate himself with the Evangelical base. These Fundamentalist religious fanatics would not accept EVOLUTION and ignore all evidence, fossil proofs, scientific studies and the like. It is as if they celebrate ignorance and to them Rick Perry is to be elevated to the same status of a Rhodes Scholar.

How many times are we, the American people going to have to go down this road again? I mean, the fucking Monkey Trials happened many decades ago and we settled that issue. But no, the fucking Evangelicals in their myopic view of the Scriptures insist that the world is 6,000 years old and that EVOLUTION is just a theory full of holes.

British Evolutionary Biologist and Author

Richard Dawkins

“There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.”

Once more, the Teahadist-Republicans are pandering to the fucking Evangelical Fundamentalists and frankly, the majority of the American people are sick of it. Besides the issue of SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE…and yes, that is a fact they want to ignore because they really think we are a Christian nation…not what our FOUNDING FATHERS intended when they made it amply clear that there was to be that line separating religion from government.

A LITTLE HISTORY: THE TENNESSEE MONKEY TRIAL

“John Scopes...the young Tennessee school teacher deliberately broke the new law banning the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary theory in Tennessee classrooms



The law, which had been passed in March, made it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to "teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."



With local businessman George Rappalyea, Scopes had conspired to get charged with this violation, and after his arrest the pair enlisted the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to organize a defense. Hearing of this coordinated attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defense, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in U.S. history.”

In front of several thousand spectators in the open air, Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called Bryan in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd.

On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed.



Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up.



In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

SOURCE: http://www.soonerfans.com/forums/showthread.php?143013-Good-Morning-Monkey-Trial-Ends.

We already got the message about you being reasonable and willing to compromise

We know Mr. President that you are sensible, pragmatic, unflappable and calm. These are qualities we all admire. We have seen have you have bent over backwards to give in to all or most of the demands of the far right conservatives.

Most Americans have not been pleased with this kind of approach and you have suffered politically for it…but worst of all our country has had to adopt unreasonable, stupid and destructive policies that have made our problems even worse. Even if the majority of voters expressed dissatisfaction with government and bought into the Republican-Teahadist ideology and in 2010 voted for them…they are now having second thoughts, buyer’s remorse, if you will about electing people like Governor Scott or Walker. We see the visceral repudiation of their policies and we see people involved in grassroots movements to try to correct the mistake they made by electing them.

Mr. President, time and time again you have given up some very important issue that is crucial to the well being of the American people and our nation in your effort to be compromising; we saw it with the Health Care Reform when you surrendered the public option even before you sat down to negotiate with them. Then we saw how you agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in order to extend unemployment benefits to those without jobs. Lately, Mr. President, you agreed to a debt ceiling compromise that gave the Republican-Tehadists everything…or nearly everything they wanted…only to see our nation being deemed unworthy of a triple A credit rating by S&P.

Dear Mr. President, you are going to have to start fighting back some time, you are going to have to be confrontational at some point even if you don’t like it; because if you don’t…then we are all going to be living in an America nobody could live in or want to live in.

So Mr. President, start fighting now and not two weeks before the elections of 2012.

What to do? We go to plan B…bail out the banks and Wall Street and screw the American people.

It is mind boggling how Republicans have succeeded in instituting a scorch-the-earth austerity mentality on our country. Even Liberal Progressives are singing the praises of cuts in spending and reducing our debt at the expense of prosperity and economic growth. We know for a fact…and there are reputable economists who insist in this; that we can’t create jobs and bring back prosperity by cutting and reducing government spending at this time…just the opposite…if private enterprise has deemed it necessary to sit on trillions of dollars and not pump it back into the economy, if they are systematically closing plants and laying off workers in America to take them abroad…then we have to rely on our government to kick start the sluggish economy…but NO…NO…NO, that would mean that we will actually have job creation and we will be out of the recession the Republicans left us…that will mean that President Obama will look good and could be re-elected…

So, what are they to do? What will Republicans continue to insist on doing? Why…it is more of the same, more TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS…give more tax cuts to the rich, more loopholes to corporations and eliminate all social safety net programs. It is the ideal situation, the dream of every fucking Republican that has ever lived…to dismantle all of FDR’s programs, to return to the beginning of the last century where big business ruled the country.

Why capitalism is choosing Plan B

As Richard Wolff tells us: “Austerity for labour and the public is everywhere capitalism's Plan B. Even capitalists now see that capitalism's Plan A failed.

You will recall that Plan A entailed a crisis-response programme of bailing out the banks, insurance companies, large corporations and stock markets to achieve "recovery". The theory behind Plan A – we used to call it "trickle-down economics" – was that recovery would spread from financial markets and financiers to everyone else. It never did. So now the same servants of capitalism who imposed Plan A are dishing out Plan B.”

Richard Wolff also says: “Corporations and the rich bankroll the parties and governors who design and impose Plans A and B, while avoiding Plan C. And so matters will remain unless and until corporations' profits are no longer available to their boards of directors to enrich themselves and major shareholders and to buy politicians' servitude. The best response to capitalism's crisis, to its failed Plan A and to its unjust Plan B would be a Plan D: to change how we organize productive enterprises in our society. Profits should be distributed by the democratic decision-making of all those who produce and depend on them, the workers and affected communities.”

So basically, what we have is a PLUTOCRACY that will, when they are good and ready to get the economy started again…because they realize that they could get even more profits from a prosperous nation than from a failed one…we all have to suck our thumbs and waddle in the mud puddle of misery and deprivation.

From the 50’s and into the early 1960s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years. Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%.

The graph above shows the portion/percentage of total national income taken by the top 1%, the top tenth of a percent, and the top 100th of a percent of individuals and families: the richest of the rich.

This graph compares what happened to the after-tax household incomes of Americans from 1979 to 2005 (adjusted for inflation). The bottom fifth of poorest citizens saw their income barely rise at all. The middle fifth of income earners saw their after-tax household income rise by less than 25%. Meanwhile, the top 1 % of households saw their after-tax household incomes rise by 175%.

Richard D Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the graduate programme in international affairs of the New School University, New York City. Richard also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. His most recent book is Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (2009). A full archive of Richard's work, including videos and podcasts, can be found on his site

SOURCES: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/01/us-taxation-public-finance

That is what you hear from Republicans.

But they don’t tell you two very important things: First, that President Obama wants to raise taxes only on the wealthy and the corporations…those making under $250,000 would not be affected…and two, most of the American people according to the majority of polls also want the wealthy to pay their fair share…in other words…RAISE THEIR TAXES, not yours!.

Here is an interesting chart I found in CRITTER’S CRAP - http://critterscrap.blogspot.com/

And do you know why? Because by now most people realize that the Republican-Teahadist argument of TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS is no longer an accepted economic theory.

Her views are clearly in tune with the DOMINIONIST movement.

If you follow my blog then you would know that I have no stomach for Evangelicals, Fundamentalists or any other type of religious fanatics of any stripe. It is a visceral dislike, it is a total repudiation of what they stand for and the twisted ways in which they act by distorting the Scriptures and behaving in society as though they were so exclusively linked to the Creator; that it was this deity alone who anointed these assholes to be the most dominant force in our society. Nothing could be more disdainful to me than an Evangelical running for office carrying a Bible as his/her only credentials. It defies logic and it defies what our country stands for…never would there be a litmus test on a candidate’s religion or the need to have one in order to get elected.

But when I see that even the Evangelicals are repudiating the brand of far out, fringe stupidity that Michelle Bachmann and others are selling I begin to really question. It is amusing to see them fight it out but at the same time it is terribly tragic that a person with such radical views would even be considered for any public office.

It is alarming to think of how things will turn out if these super-extreme right wing Dominionist Evangelicals take over our country. The kind of theocracy that we would have would be even more extreme than the one in Iran and there would be such overreaching repression of those who are not Evangelicals that America would become not just a tyranny but a very poor country.

If you want to understand how twisted, how misguided and askew this type of thinking is, just think that the murderous spree this Norwegian Dominionist went on is part of this movement and his way of thinking differs little from that of Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry.

I ran across this short article by Dakota O'Leary I think it sums it up very well:

“In an interview with MSNBC, Frank Schaeffer, son of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, father of the modern evangelical Republican movement, stated point blank that Michele Bachmann's religious beliefs will be liability for her in the 2012 Presidential elections. The Washington Independent reports:

Author Frank Schaeffer told MSNBC on Wednesday that Michele Bachmann’s beliefs will be a liability for her with the general public if she gets the GOP nomination in 2012. And Schaeffer knows something about where Bachmann stands: His father, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, was the founder of the modern religious right, and both Bachmann and her husband Marcus count Schaeffer as a top influence on their worldview and political ideology.

“The part of Christianity she comes from is radical even for evangelical Bible believers,” Schaeffer told MSNBC. “I think gradually, it will become apparent to American voters that she could not win the general election. And Republicans are going to have to make a choice to either be a normal political party or, really, theocracy in waiting with people like Michele Bachmann, who in the best of all possible worlds, as far as she would see it, would produce a theocracy in the country where the Bible would be paramount and no longer the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.”

He continued, “Look, they love a fictional, Christian America that wouldn’t include gay people, would not have choice and abortion rights for women and all the rest of this. But in terms of the real America, inclusive, diverse, sustaining of gay people as well as heterosexuals and so forth, this is an America they despise and that’s why they talk in terms of taking it back. Well from whom? That would be from the rest of us, ordinary American citizens under the rule of law.”

SOURCE: http://www.goddiscussion.com/70280/michele-bachmanns-religious-views-too-extreme-even-for-right-wing-evangelicals-according-to-frank-schaeffer-interview/

http://stevemitton.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

Here we go again, why is it that a segment of our citizenry insist in celebrating ignorance and stupidity?

Why is it that people who realize they are lacking the knowledge, the education and the desire to learn are always supporting these right-wing extremists?

Should Michelle Bachmann win the Republican nomination, there is always a possibility that the American people will vote for her. Misguided as the voters might be by all those unlimited funds that the special interests will be spending on the political campaign, coupled with all these think-tank right-wing PACs secretly funded by multi-millionaires and corporations as well as all the voter disenfranchising they are presently conducting…it is plausible that their vitriol, their lies, their negative campaign will result in a Bachmann win.

But wait a minute, here too we can figure in the high unemployment rate; clearly a result of a pervasive efforts on the part of Teabagger-Republicans and powerful corporations to destroy jobs as a way of telling people that President Obama has not been able to fix the unemployment situation…But I ask you..how could he if all these right-wingers have done is obstruct, vote no, delay and sabotage any efforts on the part of the President to fix the mess he inherited…a mess George W. Bush and his cronies created…they created it because number one, they are stupid, number two they are greedy and number three they follow a very sick and askew ideology; that one Reagan left us with: TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

We have to be relentless in pointing out to all these “supporters” that Michelle Bachmann is a radical, a misguided person bordering on fanatical and such a person has no place at the helm of the greatest power in the world. Oppose them, I say, because not to do so is to empower them and then they think as they always do that they have a mandate.

So, if you are gay or have someone dear to you who is gay, please try to remember who the homophobic candidates are. Here is a chart that might help you decide:

PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.citypages.com/2010-01-06/news/michele-bachmann-wingnut-of-the-year/