Crybabies

These loser ReThugs who are wailing & clutching their pearls over the decision of the Marathon Country Labor Council in Wisco not to allow Sean "I Can't Control My Own Finance, But I'll Do Yours" Duffy or other ReThugs from participating in their annual Labor Day parade are hypocrites beyond the pale.  They howl & bay at the moon of private enterprise, the kind that tells certain people that they can't take part, like, oh let's see, country clubs, church groups, etc., yet, when a Labor Council decides to do the same thing, the moron right has conniptions.  ReThuglicans everywhere & certainly here in Wisco have done everything in their power to destroy the union movement.  Why then, should a Labor Council allow a ReThug to parade with them, when it is clear that Sean Duffy stands with them one day a year, the day of a parade where he can smile that MTV smile, while behind that smile is as backward a thinker as a person can find.  Good for the workers in Marathon Co. & Wausau.

Happy Birthday

The Babies turn five years old today.  Time, time, time, eh?  I hope you guys have a great, wonderful, fun, happy day.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

& good luck at school on Wednesday.

Watch This

Then tell me what you think. Thanks. This is in response to the awful massacre in Norway a few weeks ago.

Unfortunate, But Hilarious, First Paragraph

The headline reads:

Bull semen spill causes scare, closes highway

The first paragraph of the story reads:

The incident began when the driver of a Greyhound bus carrying the freight alerted the fire department he had lost a part of his load while negotiating the ramp on a highway near Nashville.

My emphasis.

Nick Ashford, R.I.P.

He's dead.

 

Finally, Some Good News, At Least For Me

I think I'll start with a gin & tonic.

Let's See, Oh, Yeah, It's Time For Scott Walker To Blame Somebody For His Lousy Policies

Isn't it great how ReThugs, when faced with actual facts, play the victim so easily?  What a jerk.  Wisco's in deep shit & he's looking around to find someone or something to blame, what a tool.

Asked whether he should be held accountable for July's decline as long as he also wants credit for June's gain, Walker responded by describing what he called "incredible uncertainty both at the federal level - in terms of the debt ceiling and all the tension of that, and the negative impact that had on the economy - combined with July and August, when you saw the height of the recall commercials. And I think for a lot of employers we talked to, that created a high level of uncertainty, not knowing what was going to come next."

 

Notice how he didn't answer the question, typical ReThuglican.  Oh, BTW, Russ Feingold isn't going to run for any elected office in 2012.  He likes his full-time job at Marquette a lot & wants to stay there.  I think we all would like a full-time job at a major university.  I like Russ Feingolg a lot, but this is disheartening.

"...staggering failure...."

But, of course, this is Murica, we don't need no stinking alternative energy.  We just drill us another oil well, squeeze some sand, or buy a bigger SUV.  We could have been so much more, so much better.

Renewable energy offers the best hope for an economic boom in the coming decades.

Those who feel this can be accomplished without clean-energy goals and incentives are ignoring reality. China and Germany, with vastly smaller economies, invested more in clean energy than the United States last year. It was Chinese competition that ultimately doomed Evergreen Solar. Americans who tout the old nostrum that all businesses need is a level playing field forget that the energy sector has never been level; the heavily subsidized and regulated oil and gas industries attest to that.

Well, Duh?

Ya think?

On the other hand, his political folks like David Plouffe and Bill Daley want him to pursue pragmatic, passable policies like free trade deals and better protections for patent-holders. Supposedly the premise is that these issues appeal to independent voters. This can't possibly be real. If there's an independent, undecided voter out there who will tip towards Obama because he gets a free trade deal with Korea passed in the next year, please show him to us.

*****

Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Daley share the view that a focus on deficit reduction is an economic and political imperative, according to people who have spoken with them. Voters believe that paying down the debt will help the economy, and the White House agrees, although it wants to avoid cutting too much spending while the economy remains weak.

So basically, they want Obama to be more Republican, as if a voter, whose chief concern about the deficit is ever going to vote for Obama.

*****

Perhaps the most worrisome part is that there doesn't seem to be anyone at The White House who really grasps the magnitude of the economic problem (and by that, we're mostly talking about joblessness) who also has a clear idea how to address it.

My emphases.

Yep, Yep, Yep, Yep

Pay taxes, good lord, man, are you out of your mind?

Here's the paradox in this whole concept of "corporate personhood." When it comes to rights, Republicans say corporations are people. But when it comes to the responsibilities of personhood - like paying taxes, being sued for negligence or criminal manslaughter, that sort of thing - their response is "Are you crazy? We're talking about corporations here, not people.

Heh, One Down & Way Too Many Nut Jobs To Go

Pawlenty, Pawlently!, !!Pawlenty!!  -  er, not so much.

634 Points

& it ain't good points.

 

Mark Hatfield, R.I.P.

He's dead.

 

Great Read

Sad truth, however. This article is what I would have written had I the talent.  I was unimpressed, as I've said many times before, by President Obama's brief history in politics - I felt he was a centrist who did not understand the larger issues.  However, I also felt that he was elected at an historic time & that he would rise to the level of a FDR & actually do something for America & not just for the richest Americans.  I said it just awhile back, I feel that for the first time in my life I wasted my vote in 2008.  Foolishly, I had too much hope, too much happiness, too much confidence that something I never thought would happen in my lifetime, the election of a black president, would permanently alter the country in many positive ways.  I sure was wrong.  I must thank my very good friend B. for the heads up.

IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it.

*****

To the average American, who was still staring into the abyss, the half-stimulus did nothing but prove that Ronald Reagan was right, that government is the problem. In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, “stick.” Nor did anyone explain what health care reform was supposed to accomplish (other than the unbelievable and even more uninspiring claim that it would “bend the cost curve”), or why “credit card reform” had led to an increase in the interest rates they were already struggling to pay. Nor did anyone explain why saving the banks was such a priority, when saving the homes the banks were foreclosing didn’t seem to be. All Americans knew, and all they know today, is that they’re still unemployed, they’re still worried about how they’re going to pay their bills at the end of the month and their kids still can’t get a job. And now the Republicans are chipping away at unemployment insurance, and the president is making his usual impotent verbal exhortations after bargaining it away.

****

But it’s not just jobs. Americans don’t share the priorities of either party on taxes, budgets or any of the things Congress and the president have just agreed to slash — or failed to slash, like subsidies to oil companies. When it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy, Americans are united across the political spectrum, supporting a message that says, “In times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.”
****

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts.

****

He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day.

****

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
****

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.
****

When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability.

My emphases.

I'm Really Going To Get My Passport This Week, Really

Thanks to Shutterwi for this encouraging, up-lifting, blah, blah, blah.  Maybe thanks isn't the correct word.  Oh, well, go read & it's OK if you weep, cry, swear, throw something, but no kicking the dog, eating the goldfish, or putting the horse up wet, & I mean it.

In case after case, the five hard-core Republicans of the Roberts Court have been chopping furiously at the hard-earned legal rights of workers, consumers, voters, and others who dare to challenge the power of big business elites to reign over us, both politically and economically. There has been way too little public attention focused on (much less a sustained political challenge to) what has become a spectacular abuse of government power. A survey last year by the Pew Center found that nearly three-fourths of Americans have no idea who John Roberts is. Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall as the chief justice (and I certainly wish he was, even though he's been dead for 18 years).