The GOP robbed the House of Representatives from the Democratic Party overnight last Tuesday. Additionally they narrowed the margin between Democrats and Tea Partiers in the Senate. As you all know by now, the Tea Party has captured the heart and soul of the GOP, but instead of driving voters away with their scary, extremist rhetoric, they pulled them in. What gives? I thought America was a Centrist type of country, rarely given to wild swings in one direction or the other.

Thug

Perhaps the character of the American people has changed. I think there are some worrisome signs out there. A woman was viciously assaulted in Kentucky by Paul supporters right before Rand Paul (Tea Party) debated Jack Conway (Democratic Party). Rand Paul never denounced the attack or the attackers. I have a brother in law who is a Kentuckian, and he is about the nicest person you’re ever going to want to meet. However, it seems that the majority of his home state is happy to vote in a thug. That is what little Rand is, among other odious things. He believes that the government that governs least governs best. Of course he is quoting Thomas Jefferson, who was a slave owner, serial rapist and an inventor. Thomas Jefferson was speaking from the distant mists of the Eighteenth Century, and what he was saying was his opinion, not fact. Others felt differently then and they still do today.

In an enlightened society, the government must take responsibility for its weakest members. It should not just kick them to the curb to live and die in wretched pain, loneliness and misery. It is in the best interest of society to invest heavily in education and social welfare. Thomas Jefferson also said that the price of liberty is constant vigilance. Given the unimaginable changes that have transpired since 1776, we now need trained and skilled professionals to run our government and its bureaucracy. So we need more scientists at EPA, CDC, NIH, NRL, etc. doing research with government grants and sharing those findings free of charge to the rest of the world. We need to invest in our schools. That’s more than just a platitude. An International Monetary Fund staff paper written in 1980 about India and Korea shows that the better educated the population is, the higher the future Gross Domestic Product will be. The Tea Party, formerly known as the Republican Party, the Grand Old Party, or GOP is a conglomeration of multi-national corporate greed and national stupidity.

What Harry’s win shows

Knocked Out Angle

The Tea Party wanted to unseat Harry Reid. It was like the smell of bacon in the morning to them. His Senate seat was a ripe plum just ready to be picked. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, Senator for Nevada was looking at a double-digit deficit when the election cycle began. If people could have voted earlier, by a month perhaps, Reid might very well have suffered a blinding defeat at the hands of Sharron Angle. But that’s not what happened. Harry Reid, that wily old boxer, took down another opponent in another nail-biter of an election. His friends in the Senate call him Landslide Harry, as a wry joke about the tight races he’s always won. I read sad farewells for Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and I think, if Harry could win in Nevada, why couldn’t Russ win in his district? Anything you say about Ron Johnson running ads attaching him to Obama will make me turn a deaf ear. Harry Reid was Obama’s point man in the Senate. He pushed Health Care Reform through the Senate with his bare hands. Yet he’s still standing. What’s the difference? I propose that Harry ran a better campaign than Russ. If you are out spent, then that means your campaign has to work harder with less. Campaigns waste ridiculous amounts of money. Running a lean campaign could be an easier proposition, if you know where to place your ads. If you know where to place your candidate so that he gets lots of free publicity, then you can run a winning campaign.

Obama’s Failure

Partisan warrior

The closest poll I’ve seen over the past few days showed that 44% approved of the job Obama is doing as President and 49% disapproved. Other polls show a bigger spread, on the side of the disapprovers. What happened to Mr. Hope? He miscalculated. He thought that the Republicans could be reasoned with. He refused to acknowledge, until it was too late, that the Republican, now Tea Party, plan was to keep things as lousy and rotten as possible so that in 2012, they could vote him out of office. Mitch McConnell, the multi-chinned Senate Minority Leader said as much just yesterday. Obama allowed his political enemies to misrepresent health insurance reform with that old battle cry from previous eras, “Socialism,” and they taunted the President, calling his historic achievement, “Obamacare.” He should not have left these attacks unchallenged. He thought the prestige of his Office would carry him along on the buoyant wave that brought him into office. Instead of getting into the trenches and fighting tooth and nail for his friends in Congress, he shrugged his shoulders and distanced himself from the Mid-terms, hoping it would cushion this ugly reality – the American people have decided that they don’t like Obama anymore. Why is that? Well, that’s a topic for another day, but it is clear that he has lost the battle of the air waves to the Tea Party. God help us all.

In my humble opinion, Obama should have made getting our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan his number one priority once he got in office. That would have garnered a lot of votes and smiles because these wars are unpopular. I don’t need to quote a poll to tell you that. Maybe then he should have addressed health care, and he should have insisted that the Senate squelch all debate. Reid could have pushed the bill through the Senate more quietly than he did. It was the loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate that began the slide for the Democratic Party. It made them look like losers, just as did all the tom-foolery in the Senate over health insurance reform.

Lastly, members of the Democratic Party itself helped to weaken Obama. I’m talking about the folks who call themselves “progressives,” now that Liberal is as toxic a word as Chernobyl. The liberals of the party got mad at Obama and kept snipping at his heels over their individual issues. They threw him over the more the health bill got watered down. The longer our troops stayed abroad, the less they supported him. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. They were racists who assumed, “He’s black. He’s gonna be as liberal as Nancy Pelosi and more.” They never listened to him. He’s a centrist. At least he tries to be. To this observer, the behavior of the left wing of the Democratic Party is as much at fault for the mid-term debacle as the Tea Party, formerly called the Republican Party.

But nothing is working!

I found this picture amusing because it says all these wonderful things are “in the works,” but there are some problems with this expensive, waste-of-taxpayers’-money campaign. First of all, nobody is working, so we don’t want to hear about things that are “in the works!” Second of all, no time table is given for us to expect improvement or completion of said projects. The banners are ugly.

Scott Minerd is a Managing Partner of Guggenheim Partners. He is also CEO for Guggenheim Partners Asset Management, where he functions as chief investment officer, overseeing more than $25 billion in client assets. Minerd previously worked as a managing director for Morgan Stanley…

Guggenheim Foundation money man, Scott Minerd, recently told the BBC that Americans were starting to blame Obama for the economic depression, rather than the real culprits, the GOP, George W. Bush specifically, who inherited a robust economy with a Federal budget that was in the BLACK. By the time the depression hit, during the middle of Mr. Bush’s second term, everybody and their great-grandmother knew that George W. Bush started a war in Iraq that was based on lies. They knew that he and his cronies on the Supreme Court (aka SCOTUS) had shredded the Constitution without a peep from Congress (2001-2007). Everybody knew that Bush 2.0, as I like to call him, ignored domestic affairs (remember Hurricane Katrina?) to the detriment of our nation.

Now some spin-doctor from Wall Street, using the name of Guggenheim as a cloak to hide his perfidy, goes on BBC News and suggests that Americans are starting to blame Obama for the depression because economic indicators aren’t improving fast enough. The clip is now missing from the BBC website; however, here’s a little tid-bit from Bloomberg where Mr. Minerd gets a jab in at the Democratic Congress and “Administration.”

Mr. Wall Street

Here’s a brief biography from the Milken Institute, where Mr. Minerd was a featured speaker  at their 2007 conference State of the State (California) entitled, “Leading Global Innovation.” That means we were on the very cusp of the economic meltdown that occurred very clearly in the Bush 2.0 administration. “Scott Minerd is a Managing Partner of Guggenheim Partners. He is also CEO for Guggenheim Partners Asset Management, where he functions as chief investment officer, overseeing more than $25 billion in client assets. Minerd previously worked as a managing director for Morgan Stanley…” Minerd made his financial debut as a CPA at Price Waterhouse, not a bad start. He tried to earn a graduate degree from “both the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.” He got his bachelor degree “in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.” Minerd has also dabbled in Swiss Banking, so his Wall Street credentials are spotless. Check out the C-minus student status in grad school. Boo-yah! He could join the club of C students that was established by Bush 2.0 when he gave that pathetic speech to those college graduates

Dude Minerd has shared his economic wisdom on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and BBC News, just to name a few of his push-pen appearances on the media map. Clearly he represents the interests of Wall Street fat cats, over the interests of the Main Street little guys. Sounds a bit like two baseball teams, doesn’t it? Smart money is always on Wall St. So the next time someone tries to excoriate the media left-wing bias, just throw in the name of Mr. Minerd. On the surface, he looks and sounds like a non-partisan expert, sharing his expert wisdom and stating the facts as they are. In reality, he is a right-wing partisan, using his salesman persona to peddle his personal opinions for financial gain.

To Mr. Minderd,

Please go back to Switzerland and run your international dirty deals over there. Distance yourself from the American stock markets. Your agenda, simply put, is to make the life of the average American, even more economically miserable by several degrees. We both know why. You want to de-regulate Wall Streets, so dirty deals can be done in the light of day. You don’t want to be forced to call in new lawyers to help you find the loop holes that you will need exploit in the well-deserved, regulatory environment that you now find yourself.

Thanks for the Depression!

Alan Greenspan has been going everywhere (Meet the Press, Washington Post, etc) spinning like the best of the wonks inside the D.C. Beltway. Now he’s saying that the recovery has stalled, which “feels like a quasi-recession,” and he’s also saying that if foreclosures increase then a double-dip recession is certain to occur. Thanks for that uplifting analysis, Your Chairmanship. If you want a barely legible breakdown of Mr. Doublespeak’s interview with the Post, then go to Ezra Klein’s recent posting. Thanks to Greenspan’s vigilant guardianship, we didn’t have to worry about corrosive inflation during his ill-fated tenure as head of the Federal Reserve Board; however, he wasn’t minding the shop. No, we don’t have the hyper-inflation that occurred in Weimar Germany, but we are mired in an economic depression, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the 1930′s. Why? Mr. Greenspan gave the mortgage lenders the green light for sub-prime mortgages. Under President Bill Clinton, our nation experienced an unprecedented period of economic expansion. Why? Because worker productivity sky-rocketed under his tenure. He left office with astronomical approval ratings, and a grateful nation that saw our national debt shrinking, and the books in the BLACK for the first time since I don’t know when. Truman, maybe?

Now this man, who many hold as the font of all economic wisdom, but who is actually one of the top five people to blame for our current economic doldrums, is spouting off about a Jimmy Carter-esque double-dip recession! How dare you open your mouth, Greenspan. Keep it shut. Don’t try to clear your name. In time, you will only be a footnote in history, an ugly footnote, but nobody will really care who or what you are, except partisan Republicans who at this very moment are trying to foist the economic depression onto Obama’s shoulders.

Afghanistan, quagmire delux

Thanks to Wikileaks, we all know what we’ve all known all along. Afghanistan is a losing war. Nobody has ever won a war in that “theater,” as generals euphemistically call them. The Brit’s, who built the empire upon which the Sun never set, marched into Afghanistan twice. The first Anglo-Afghanistan war lasted from 1838 to 1842. It ended in failure. The second war was shorter, thus less of a failure by modern standards. It lasted from 1878-1880. I’d like to recommend a book that illuminates these facts in more detailed terms than the Wikipedia links that I’ve just provided. It is called The Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. If you are interested in history at all, this book will be a real page-turner. Another book, India, Great Rebellion of 1857 by Kunal Chattopadhyay is a cautionary tale that provides great insight into the pitfalls of Imperialism. Sometimes even when you think everything is just grand, some little tiny thing will happen and the whole enterprise explodes in your face! And let’s not forget the Russian embarrassment back in the late Seventies. It wasn’t Reagan who brought down Commie Russia, it was the intransigent Politburo that wouldn’t accept defeat in the terrain from Hell; that is, Afghanistan.

Russians retreating from Afghanistan (1989) Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev.

All of this comes just as President Obama announces that our troops are really, really, really coming home from Iraq “by the end of next year (2011).” Hm. I’ll believe it when I see it. This last LINK is from BBC News and it contains a video of Obama to have all of our troops home by the end of 2011. Watch. Listen. And remember. In 2009 his campaign promised to get our boys and girls out of Iraq within 16 months of his swearing-in. That was in January 2009. That means that the last of our troops should have left Iraq last April. Obama. Obama. Obama. I want to talk to Michelle about your credibility gap, as we used to say during the Nixon administration. Maybe she can beat some sense into you. As is often the case, the First Lady is more popular than the President. Put HER in front of the cameras for God’s sake!

This postings pic to remember.

General Tommy "Quagmire" Franks talks to special forces. Are those Kalashnikovs?

With a headline reading, Republicans Garner 11-Point Lead in Midterms, you’d think that the election was today and they were giving a play-by-play of results. I took a look at the actual poll and it seems fairly above board. The story’s interpretation of the results however, is a bit skewed. According to this poll, Obama’s approval rating is at 50% with 41% disapproving. They don’t indicate what the other 9% are doing, but I assume they don’t know or are undecided. The big story about this poll, if you care to take it seriously, is that as usual, it is the Independents who will decide the midterm election results. It is stunning on how many issues the respondents stated that they didn’t know where they stood on an issue:

• Race relations – fifteen percent don’t know
• Terrorism – ten percent don’t know
• Afghanistan – eleven percent don’t know
• Iran – sixteen percent don’t know
• Immigration – eleven percent don’t know

These double digits are where the results of the midterm election reside. If the Republicans can get across a message that resonates with these people who haven’t made up their minds, or are confused on the issues, then they will seize control of both houses of Congress. The same holds true for Democrats. The American people still love the President and after his appearance on the View, he needs to start going to important places, like Ohio and Minnesota, the heartland and make lots of speeches and raise lots of money for the Democrats. The untold story here is that the GOP is going into the midterms broke. Michael Steele, whose job was to raise money, ended up spending more than he raised, leaving the GOP in a sinkhole full of red ink. Now who is the one person who can go state to state and guarantee lots of turnout and can shake that money tree until it is bare? That’s right, Sarah Palin is the only person who can save the GOP now. Who cares if she is a blockhead. Bush 2 was an incredible blockhead but in his heyday, he could show up in a town, throw a thousand dollar a plate dinner and have people elbowing for a seat. Sarah Palin is the only person left in the GOP with that kind of draw. Of course this is good news for the nutcase tea-party wing of the GOP and indicates the apocalyptic situation that the Grand ol’ Party is facing. That’s why Obama has a spring in his step. That’s why the 111th Congress can go home to their constituents and say, “We worked our asses off for you and passed legislation that will improve the lives of millions of Americans.” The GOP’s only message right now is that they did their damnedest to block any legislation from emerging from the 111th Congress.

As usual…

Congress is hated. Seventy one percent said that they didn’t like the job Congress was doing. It’s an American tradition to hate Congress.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. –Mark Twain

For over a hundred years, Americans have taken extreme joy in attacking Congress. Then there’s Will Rogers, who said that we have the best Congress that money can buy. Well, thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on “free speech” and First Amendment rights, that will be even more true. Yes, that old truism, “Money talks. Bullshit walks,” now has Constitutional backing. Let the Associated Press explain what I’m talking about:

This video explains why Roberts and Alito, who both swore under oath that they would not reverse long-standing laws, are liars. This is bad news for women’s rights, privacy, or anything that involves corporate invasion of the body politic. Let’s not forget that our Chief Justice of SCOTUS, Roberts is the scion of a wealthy industrialist. His papa was a plant manager for Bethlehem Steel. So it looks like to me that all those tax dollars that went to bail out the corporations will now be used to bail out the GOP in the midterm elections. Ain’t democracy just grand?

But then (tympanic drum roll– thunderous)

Not on your life! He’s still the same adorable Bill O’Reilly that we’ve all come to know and love.

And Dick Morris- Greasiest Fingers in D.C.

The One hundred and eleventh Congress of the United States of America will go down in history as one of the most important events in American history. It will catalyze a new era of government by the people and for the people.–Russell Smith

It is absolutely jawdropping. This Congress, in less than two years, has done more than the GOP dominated body did in six or even more years in power. To date they have enacted over a dozen pieces of legislation that were then signed into law by our beloved President Obama. Picking the month, May 2009 out of the air, I find that this is when they passed the

• Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009
• Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 and
• Credit CARD Act of 2009.

This Congress passed the first national health care insurance and reform legislation– to bring down costs and lift millions out of illness-induced poverty. They passed the first serious regulation of Wall Street since FDR. Now they are working on addressing climate change. It’s like a powerhouse two-year explosion of activity. What gives? I’ve always looked upon Congress as a collection of fat, lazy men and women who like cushy jobs with power, but few duties. How wrong was I? This 111th Congress fears losing the Senate and maybe even the House during the mid-term elections. I applaud Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for the backbreaking work they’ve done to push so much legislation through. I wonder if they’ve beaten a record for most laws passed by a single session? On the other hand, we have Michele Bachmann, Orin Hatch, Jeff Sessions, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is on something, or just burnt-out, but John Cornhole, excuse me! I mean John Cornyn, the junior Senator from Texas is full of Church of Christ hellfire and sulphur wind. Then there’s Boehner in the other chamber, the House of Representatives. He’s from a wealthy, old money, Mid-west district in South-western Ohio that is ninety percent white and he’s the Minority Leader of the House, shining like a beacon of hypocrisy with all that bronzer, or hours in a tanning booth. He’s creepy. Plain creepy.

The Great Dali

I enjoyed watching that hybrid amphibian/human that is known as Dick Morris. Only Fox Noise would give this man a voice and a platform. And then you have O’Reilly trying to emphasize Fox News’ integrity, with his pathetic repetition  of the phrase, “…but we’re the only one’s who are going to report on this.” These mean spirited, anti-Constitutionalists, who would love to see Jim Crowe laws reinstated, and shiploads of African-Americans being “repatriated to Liberia,” have the nerve to try to take the high ground on race relations? It’s like a circus directed by Frederico Felini, or Salvador Dali. Morris is the smarmiest. It almost sounds like a campaign rally chant. Try it! “Morris is the smarmiest!” And his name is Dick Morris. All the bawdy ribaldry aside, Dick Morris is the most partisan individuals on the map. Dick Morris was a former friend of Bill Clinton’s until it was discovered that he was living a secret life. One that involved prostitutes and security breaches. In his resignation letter to Bill Clinton, Morris, who must have been drunk, wrote that he was responsible for Clinton’s “come back from being buried in a landslide.” I’m quoting Wikipedia here, but it’s alleged that he has a bastard by a woman in Texas. Who wants to bet she lived in a trailer?

Dick Morris is vile. He says that Obama caved into pressure to fire Shirley Sharrod for supposedly making inappropriate racial remarks. Obama had nothing to do with it. It was obviously an internal Dept. of Agriculture issue and there was no reason to bring the President into the discussion. Poor Tom Vilsack didn’t have all of the facts and was only presented with an Andrew Breitbart production, with whole paragraphs removed from Ms. Sharrod’s speech. All of her comments were taken out of context, and the whole point of her speech was to urge racial harmony. When Tom Vilsak got all of the information, including an unexpurgated copy of the lady’s talk, he set out to right a wrong, as O’Reilly says, and it’s no big deal! Then they both go on to agree that this “Shérrod or Sherród woman,” as O’Reilly insisted on calling her throughout the entire bit was really amusing. To call what he called an apology is like calling a Hostess Twinkie a gourmet dessert.

Slimeball and Fox Perrenial

Under Reaganomics-Bush I -economics and Bush II- economics, the rich got tax cut on top of tax cut. Military spending was the priority. The G.O.P. can only say “No!” to whatever the Democrats want to do. Any Republican who dares cross the aisle faces censure on a nuclear level. The two brave ladies from Maine, who by bucking the Republican Party, have only done so when it wasn’t a deciding factor. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe should be be proud of helping the distressed millions who have been punished by the risk taking speculators and swindlers of Wall Street. Americans constantly demand bipartisanship behavior, in poll after poll. For instance early in the year, the Washington Post published a poll. This is what it said in part,

The sticky part of widespread desire for compromise is that it’s simple to want it from the other side. About three-quarters of Democrats see the congressional Republicans as intransigent, while a similar proportion of Republicans see Obama that way. But even Republicans are critical of their congressional leadership, with 44 percent seeing them as doing too little to strike deals with Obama; that compares with just 13 percent of Democrats worried about inaction on Obama’s part.

In other words, Republicans suck.

Carte Goodwin, 36

Thanks to two Republican Senators, both from the great state of Maine and the investiture today of the new Senator from West Virginia, attorney Carte Goodwin, 36, Senate Democrats will be able to finally pass an extension to unemployment benefits. Carte will become the 59th member of the Senate Democratic caucus when he is sworn in today. Ironically, the man replacing one of the oldest serving Senators and the LONGEST serving Senator, will become the youngest member of that August body at the age of 36. He’s only four years shy of the cut-off date! He also makes the GOP’s Foxy Brown from Boston look like chopped liver. I’m sure more than one intern’s heart will be broken by this guy. He’s got that glint in his eye that sex, “Where’s the sex?”

Foxy Brown of Mass

At any rate, the Senate will pass the extension today, a mere $309 per week, send it over to the Senate tomorrow with President Obama signing it in tomorrow night. What a whirlwind of activity the Hill can be when there’s even an itsy bitsy part of bipartisanship? Who is the Democrat who defected? Harry Reid should put his balls in a vice and squeeze them into pulp. The rich get their tax break for another decade and we’re supposed to starve? The Republicans started class warfare in this country, the likes of which I’ve not witnessed since the Civil Rights Movement tried to correct the wrong of endemic racism. I was a wee chappy then, but it was scary. I lived on the Southeast border of Washington, D.C. and the Black Panthers, et al. were burning tires on South Capitol Street and others were looting our Safeway, Murphy’s Co. and J. C. Penny’s. It was terrifying. I hope that the GOP thinks twice before kicking over the bucket that starts the proverbial fire in their zoo tent, because the whole structure of their circus (Beck, Limbaugh, Dennis Miller, Michele Bachmann, and on and on) is extremely flammable.

My dream is that Scott (Foxy) Brown, along with the Maine contingency, become a founding stone for honest, middle of the road Republicans, who are aghast to see the religious right in control of their Party. But it’s not just the religious right; it’s the nut-jobs, the tea party-ers and followers of the aforementioned who are beyond the pale. They are going to cause the GOP to shed more and more voters, in every category of race, gender, age and economic status. Even the rich must be disturbed by the shit that comes out of Bachmanns’ mouth? She really reminds me of Dan Quayles’ wife.

It is my sincere and nonpartisan hope that Carte will live up to the standards of collegial civility that Byrd epitomized during his amazing tenure. I will take this opportunity to provide a link to the Senator‘s biography. The link appears to be under the purview of the Senate web master. I wonder if a librarian/archivist was involved in the process of putting that page together? It needs to be updated, in terms of tenses, but there is also a spot to send condolences to his family. I urge everybody who looks at this post to do so.

With the help of the honorables Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, a couple of the Republicans who I don’t think are stupid or just plain evil, people will be able to at least eat, pay rent on a flophouse room and buy a few prescriptions. Ain’t life grand?

≈≈≈≈Robert C. Byrd, In Memoriam ≈≈≈≈

Below is the statement I made on the Senator’s web page.

On this day, when the youngest serving member takes his place in the Democratic Caucus of the U.S. Senate, I hope Mr. Carte will live up to the high standards of decency and civility that Senator Robert C. Byrd maintained. Even more importantly, his study of the Constitution gave him rare insights into that most august document in the history of mankind. I will miss hearing him speak with such wit and eloquence on the Senate floor and in front of cameras and microphones. I went to Wheeling College from 1980 to 1984. I know from the alumni services of what is now called Wheeling Jesuit University that Senator Byrd took a special interest in my alma mater. A great humanist, he realized that education is the key to prosperity, creativity and innovation. I am certain your loss must be hard to bear, but I hope you can take comfort in knowing that your father will be remembered by posterity as a great defender of the Constitution, and the rule of law; but also, as a kind man, who never lost touch of his roots. He proved that a person can evolve and adapt in a world that seems increasingly rigid. He also maintained a wit and sense of humor that many in Congress should take note of. Don’t take yourself to seriously, because you can be replaced. But Robert C. Byrd never was replaced, and I don’t think he ever can be.

Senator Byrd in repose

Photo Courtesy of Daily World Investor

GOP fat cats are living high off the hog, while telling the unemployed millions to go out and find a job! The problem with that equation, and the Republicans know it, is that for every five workers, there is one open job. The Republicans know that the job opening rate is at a dismal 3.4 percent, up zero percent from last month. Also many of the hires for this month are for temporary Census jobs. (The job openings rate is the number of job openings on the last business day of the month as a percent of total employment plus job openings.) A year ago, the outlook was even more grim, but the employment rate and the number of job openings is still abysmal. This economy needs more jobs!

Crazy as it may seem, unemployment benefits cause similar effects as job creation, in terms of priming the economy. It’s a sad truth that consumer spending, Americans buying materials from each other, is a big chunk of our economy. Unemployment benefits dollars go to some things that are just static, such as the rent. People pay rent. That doesn’t create much in the economy unless the landlord is committed to capital improvements to the property, landscaping etc. Then there’s the food. Buying groceries helps the local mega-gaint grocery store chains. Clothing? Forget it. Unless the other breadwinner of the family has a decent job, clothes are a luxury of great proportion. Then there are the medications, prescriptions that people have to take. Women must needs take birth control, then hormone replacement therapy (HRT.) Doctors tinker with women’s hormones like a car mechanic with a transmission problem. Point is, nearly all women take birth control, then HRT. Most men start to take viagra, etc., at all ages, usually for recreational use, as if they would die without it. God forbid you have a cardiovascular condition like high blood pressure. God forbid you have diabetes. But if you have money to pay for these items; shelter, food, and medicine, then you can get by another day, pay a little sales tax along the way. But hope in heaven that you have at least one paycheck coming into the house.

Do you see where I am going with this? People do need to be taken care of. How we treat the weakest and sickest amongst our society is the way that future generations will judge us. Several years ago, I remarked that the L.A. County Hospital was going to lose 250 beds with the new building. My boss, at the time, said, “Well, if you want more beds, then be prepared to pay more taxes.” Guess what, honey? I’ll happily pay more taxes if it goes into a pool of other peoples’ money and then goes a long way to helping defer medical costs and pay for more, much needed hospital beds. The General Hospital, aka LAC-USC Hospital, County General, whatever name you want to call it lost beds when they built the new hospital. Bed count went from 750 to 500. It’s funny because their website states that they are budgeted to staff 745 beds. That’s a curious equation indeed.

$5,900,000.00 per helicopter

Gentle readers, do you know much one Blackhawk helicopter costs? According to the website, Global Security, it is $5.9 million dollars a piece. Staggering as that cost may seem for one helicopter, I shudder to think of the maintenance costs for battleships that haven’t fired their guns in twenty years. Then there is the nuclear arsenal to maintain, and the thousands of U.S. personnel in South Korea, and other overseas bases, not just the money-devouring wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One look at the defense budget and I’m already thinking, can’t they take just a little out of there to help keep libraries open? What about here, can’t some of that go to a job corps program that retrains workers for the modern environment. Training and education are key to expanding any economy. That is where innovation comes from. The anti-intellectualism of many on the far right sickens me.

Now let us turn back to the jobs report. So the Republicans look at the numbers presented below and they think, “Let them starve!” That is their conscious decision. They want to rile people up some before the elections in 3 months. People won’t remember why they stopped getting their checks. They will just think that “Obama let them down.” Guess what you Grand Old Party, you? People will remember that it was the heartless Republican leadership that was happy to plough hundreds of billions into a defense budget, but didn’t give a damn about people who couldn’t even get work delivering pizzas.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for adult women (7.8 percent) declined, while the rates for adult men (9.9 percent), teenagers (25.7 percent), whites (8.6 percent), blacks (15.4 percent), and Hispanics (12.4 percent) showed little or no change. The jobless rate for Asians was 7.7 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.) So while unemployment edged down by a fraction, so did American morale. Thanks Republicans, all of you living in beautiful houses, with maids and drivers and gardeners to wait on you hand and foot. The poor don’t mind that you live in self-righteous indignation at the lazy slack-abouts. They will talk about a society of need that just sucks the lifeblood out of the hardworking Americans of this land. If it weren’t for that lousy immigrant labor pouring in droves, like lemmings over a cliff, across the Southern border. Oh, yeah! They leave headless corpses out there for you to find, as a warning. What warning, I ask you, Jan Brewer? Who’s trying to warn whom, and why is it necessary to cut off heads. Wouldn’t cutting off a finger have the same effect, and much less consequences than beheading an enemy.

At any rate, the Republicans are telling the unemployed to eat nothing, nothing at all. At least Marie Antoinette was willing to grant cake to her starving masses!

Steele at far left (when Lt. Gov. of Maryland)

This disgraceful example of how rotten Maryland politicians can be, Michael Steele who served as Lt. Governor under do-nothing Governor Ehrlich, is showing just how stupid he really is. YET AGAIN! As Fox News so eloquently states on its web site, “Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was scrambling to contain the fallout over the holiday weekend from his remarks claiming Afghanistan is a ‘war of Obama’s choosing,’ which the United States never really ‘wanted to engage in.’” Okay, GOP, it’s time to sit down and accept that you made an enormous mistake when you thought that choosing this monumentally stupid loser as the Blackface Figurehead of the Republican Party during the administration of America’s first African-American President. You knew that you were going to try and shoot him down (figuratively speaking) every step of the way. Your behavior during health care reform was duplicitous, crafty and made the Democratically led Legislative branch look weak, even though they had the majority. How can a majority lead when they don’t march lock-step the way Republicans do? It’s sad that American’s don’t get the message that the Democratic Party allows intra-debate and gives its members lee-way. You Republicans look monolithic and scary. That’s my take home message, but let’s return to Michael Steele.

The GOP Plan for the RNC

You thought Steele’s black face beaming from American t.v. sets would be some kind of counter weight to Obama’s face beaming from American t.v. sets. You thought, “Oh, well, one black man is pretty much like any other,” and the majority of your members think same. But you were wrong, GOP, so very, very wrong! For instance, Michael Steele is dumber than a doorknob, while Barrack Obama as smart as a whip! (And I’m not talking about a Whip in the legislative sense.) Michael Steele has had to extricate his foot from his mouth more than once. Who can forget the Limbaugh Affair, as I like to call it, when Steele bad-mouthed the mouthpiece of the GOP, calling Rush Limbaugh all sorts of mean names like “incendiary” and “ugly.” Then there’s the little matter of the BondageGate fiasco. But since last Spring, we’ve know about the economic meltdown within the Republican Party. They have no figurehead, beside Sarah Palin, that they can drag in front of audiences and bring in big dollars. It’s a scary but also hopeful scenario. As the Tea Party battles for dominance within the GOP, those with sense will vote Democratic, knowing the consequences of bringing in mentally challenged leaders into the levers of power of the most powerful nation in the world.

Thank you to Fox News for spearheading the campaign to dislodge Michael Steele from his seat of power. He’s a scrappy fighter and he’s never been one to shy away from playing the race card against his detractors. He won’t go down without an ugly, public battle. In his bid to completely destroy the Republican Party, he has also failed to raise more money than he’s spent. That can only help the Democratic Party come November, when a third of the Senate is up for grabs. Luckily, the House seems safely Democratic. Let us not forget though, that it took two election cycles for the GOP to seize the House and that was under the aegis of America’s worst (and arguably dumbest) President, Bush the Second. Also, let us look at the Senate. Through the Sixties and Seventies, the Senate was a Democratic playground, but Reagan changed that in 1980, when the Senate flopped over by an amazing margin going from 58 Dems versus 41 Repubs to 46 Dems and 53 Repubs. It was an amazing takeover. From 1939 until then, with a brief, marginal GOP takeover during Truman’s Presidency, control of the Senate was firmly in Democratic hands. So, Obama needs to start putting on his fighting gloves and beating the GOP over the head for its racism,  and poor leadership that lead us into TWO wars, an economic meltdown, corruption, etc. He needs to sweep Democrats into the Senate and the House on his “coattails” the way Reagan did in 1980. Michael Steele, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are dancing a merry jig, thinking they are going to take back the Senate and pare away at Democratic power in the House. No, it doesn’t work that way, just because you want it.

Republicans attack an American Hero

Thurogood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993)

Republicans continue to shoot themselves in the feet, or forming a circular firing squad, if you will at the Senate confirmation hearings for Elana Kagan. Senators Orin Hatch (R-Utah) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) decided that since Kagan was a clerk for Thurogood Marshall, that it would be a good idea to trash the late, beloved Supreme Court Justice. Here’s an excerpt from an interview of Pam Karlan, a self-described liberal jurist who is (GASP!) openly gay, “Marshall went on the Supreme Court the year of Loving [the case that struck down Virginia's law prohibiting interracial marriage]. People forget what America was like before Thurgood Marshall. (Emphasis is mine- R.S.) People can think that he was some crazy radical man. But if you think he was wrong, then you think Brown was wrong. It’s staggering Orrin Hatch would say he’s not sure he could confirm Marshall who was the greatest lawyer of his generation, who did more to bring about the Constitution we know and celebrate than anyone else.” This was from the web site of the Atlantic’s political section. The interviewer was Brian Goldsmith, a contributor to TheAtlantic.com, who was also a political producer for the CBS Evening News, and is now a student at Stanford Law School. That about says it all for me.

Thurogood Marshall is a national hero. He gave his life to this country. He retired from the Supreme Court after twenty-four years of service in October of 1991 and then died in January of 1993. There should parks, streets, airports and sports colosseums named after this man. He should have a monument dedicated to him in Washington, D.C., as opposed to that pill-popping, self-aggrandizing, Nixon-appointee, named William Rehnquist, who refused to quit, even when his wife was dying of cancer and insisted on dying in office. Thurogood Marshall is worth more than every Republicant on the Senate Judiciary Committee put together. His mark on history is indelible and enduring. Well, they can’t stop Kagan from getting on the Court and I hope she she makes those Senators wish they never trashed Marshall’s memory like that. Were he alive today, I am sure that he would respond to those scumbags with wit, charm and delicacy- all the things they lack. The performance of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that it is a Party of the Past. They wish to bring back a time before the Viet Nam War, when Coloreds knew their place, women belonged at home, barefoot and pregnant, homosexuals stayed firmly in the closet and the American Eagle flew proud and free, casting its shadow of hope across the globe. Well, the past is gone and can never return. There is no place in the Senate for racists like Hatch and Sessions. Unfortunately they are playing to the choir. Their constituents are racist as all Hell. I am not as graceful as my hero, Thurogood. To Hell with all of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee!

This was a major shakedown. I cut off the cop in the middle of telling me that I shouldn’t be videotaping in the train station. Why? Terrorist target. Talk about Chicken Little behavior! The cop was lying. He and his buddy were also harassing me. I don’t have to show them my ID. They have to take it on faith when I tell them my name and address. So much for First and Fourth Amendment rights. They tried to make me erase what I had taped. I evoked intellectual property rights. I could see the thought flash across the first cop’s eyes that I might be a lawyer or some such. They let me go. Ever since that disgusting law in Arizona was passed, I know my rights. This isn’t Nazi Germany, YET. I don’t have to produce my “papers,” that prove I belong here.

What was even more laughable about this whole thing is that a fellow passenger snitched on me. That’s what all that hullabaloo was about that I mention in the video. America, America. I weep for you. It seems as though the body politic of this country is becoming ever more polarized. In Weimar Germany, the left- and right- wing nut cases began rioting in the streets on a daily basis, killing each other in broad daylight as well. It was that general breakdown in order, couple with the defeat in a recent war, and an emergent Russia, that helped usher in Hitler, et al. Sounds like a scenario that is warming up in this country.

I've got a right to put this on my blog!

God bless America!

These symbols used to stand for freedom, not water-boarding!