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Trumped

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I’m desperate and I feel compelled to send an urgent plea to republicans, since you are the only ones that can alleviate my current state of agitation. Without your help I, and the rest of America, are going to have to suffer through seventeen months of supersized stupid.

My plea is this; Please, for the love of God, sane republicans must find your voice! If you don’t rally your troops, Donald Trump is going debase you and your party, forcing you to have to deny that you’re republicans again.

Every presidential election cycle starts with one right wing whack job setting the bar of crazy that every other republican presidential hopeful must keep pace with. Aren’t sane republicans tired of being embarrassed in this way? Where the fuck are you? Why are you allowing the crazies to hijack your party, and the country’s conversation again?

Half of all republicans don’t believe that President Obama was born here. My question is, where the fuck are the other half? Is there something wrong with your throats? Speak up! Save us!

Democrats suck in eighteen million different ways (that I regularly point out) but they are good at muzzling their crazies. Can you imagine a 9/11 truther doing national interviews in which he/she hints at a presidential run? Honestly, can anyone conceive of that ever happening? Of course not! And thank God, because I would be loathe to let that kind of nutbaggery define liberalism.

And if you think I’m being unfair in drawing parallels between truthers and birthers, let me set you straight right now. Both groups show contempt for America in a way that is unparalleled by any foreign entity. The birthers have to believe that the American government is so fucking incompetent, that it can be hoodwinked by a couple of guys cooking up a plot from their huts in Kenya. The truthers are so goddamned cynical, that they believe that George W Bush is evil, competent, and powerful enough to orchestrate an attack on his own country. And he would have to be so beloved, that the hundreds of people that would have to be involved in pulling off this coup, will maintain their silence until they die. If you believe either of these things, it’s hard to imagine anyone that could hate America more than you do.

Back to my plea to sane republicans. Why are non-batshit crazy republicans letting the lunatics taint the whole party? Donald Trump is whackoing it up for attention, and he’s dragging all of you down with him. And when he surges in the polls among republicans by going all birther on us, all of you republicans get dragged into the gutter with him. Forget the pain that I will be forced to endure if you don’t stand up, you must speak out to save yourselves! Why would you allow yourselves to be dragged onto this kind of crazy?

Here’s the best part; Donald Trump is not a birther. Donald Trump is not a racist. Donald Trump isn’t even a republican. If you look at the totality of what he’s said over the past twenty years, you would have to conclude what I’ve concluded; Donald Trump is a vapid media whore that will say anything to get a camera pointed at him. Over the years, he’s referred to Jimmy Carter, George W Bush, and Barack Obama as “the worst president in US history”. He sang Obama’s praises until about a year and a half ago. He rarely ever shows up to vote. He obviously doesn’t give a shit about politics. Twenty-five years ago, when he released a book that no one was buying, he proclaimed that he was going to run for president. Book sales soared, and the Trump presidential campaign never materialized. He’s just recycling an old play in order to get more money out of NBC, who he’s in contract negotiations with to renew his reality show.

So all of you silent, sane republicans are letting your party slip into the gutter again so that Donald Trump can get an extra two million per episode. Is it worth it? Are you all good with being labeled nutjobs, just so that Trump can delay his third bankruptcy for a few months?

Please, speak up so that we can have primaries that are about ideas and ideology. Make it clear to future GOP whackos that the well is dry, and they need not apply. Let’s start off this election cycle with serious candidates that have an actual platform. I’m so fucking tired of having to suffer through lunacy before we get down to the meat of the hypocrisy. Can’t we just cut to the chase and go straight for the lies and distortions? Must we always become the laughing stock of the world first?

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Sadomasochistic Voting

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I know I’ve been a little absent lately, but not because I haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on. I’ve been so completely stunned by the bullshit coming out of Washington, that I needed to form my thoughts and do my research. And boy, did I research!

I’m going to disspell every stupid fucking thing that republicans have said in regard to the budget over the past three weeks, and I’m going to do it without sharing a single opinion.

Ready?

The first thing that I looked at was states’ GDP relative to their corporate tax rates. The tax rates among states range between 0% and 12%. I was surprised to find that Iowa had the highest tax rate by far at 12%. The next closest state was Minnesota with a 9.8% flat corporate tax rate. Here are the top ten states with the highest corporate tax rates (for the purpose of this post, I used the highest rate in states that have tiered tax rates):

Iowa – 12%
Minnesota – 9.8%
Illinois – 9.5%
Alaska – 9.4%
New Jersey – 9%
Rhode Island – 9%
Maine – 8.93%
California – 8.84%
Delaware – 8.7%
Indiana – 8.5%

Then I looked at the states with the highest GDP:

California – 1847B
Texas – 1224B
New York – 1144B
Florida – 744B
Illinois – 634B
Pennsylvania – 553B
New Jersey – 475B
Ohio – 472B
North Carolina – 400B
Georgia – 398B

That’s interesting, the state with the highest GDP (by far) is also one of the states with the highest tax rates. In fact, three out of the top ten states for GDP are also on the list of states with the highest corporate tax rates.

So that made me want to look at the states with the lowest corporate tax rates to see what their GDP is:

Washington – 0%, 323B
Nevada – 0%, 131B
South Dakota – 0%, 37B
Wyoming – 0%, 35B
Texas – 1%, 1224B
Ohio – 1.3%, 472B
Kansas – 4% – 123B
Colorado – 4.6%, 249B
Michigan – 4.95%, 383B
Mississippi – 5%, 92B

That’s weird, only two of the states with the lowest corporate tax rates are in the top ten for highest GDP. And one of those two states is Texas, where the oil developed before the low corporate state tax rate did.

Why aren’t any of the companies that put California at the top of the GDP food chain in any of the four states with no corporate taxes? Paying less taxes is what creates jobs, right? Shouldn’t all the jobs be in Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, and South Dakota? Washington ranks 14th for GDP. Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming rank 36th, 41st, and 48th. Why are Wyoming and South Dakota so unproductive, given their nonexistent corporate income tax rates? Weird.

Another weird thing that stuck out at me as I was compiling this data, is that five of the top ten highest states for GDP are solid democratic states. Three are republican and two are purple. Six of the lowest states for GDP are solidly republican, while four are democratic. That’s going to be relevant further down in this post.

The numbers clearly debunk the bullshit myth that low taxes = job creation so let’s move on.

The next thing I looked at was per capita income in each state. Seven of the top ten states with the highest per capita income are decidedly blue states. The other three are solidly red. Of the ten states with the lowest per capita income, seven are solidly red, one is blue, and two are purple.

I found it interesting that the top and bottom earners have an inverse proportion in political leanings. That inverse relationship led me to look at some other statistics, which produced some fascinating data;

Of the ten states that spend the most on K-12 education, eight are blue, while only two are red.

Seven of the states that spend the most on K-12 education are in the top ten for highest GDP.

Of the ten states that spend the least on K-12 education, nine are red, one is purple, none are blue.

Only one of the ten states that spends the least on K-12 education even cracked the top twenty for GDP.

What does any of this have to do with the title of this post? I’m finally getting there. Look, you know when you live in a shitty place. When you’re in a poor state or a poor neighborhood, you know it. There’s are no illusions about your lot in life. The biggest difference between republicans and democrats is that republicans fundamentally believe that shitty is normal, and that there’s no such thing as a government that can change that. They believe that government will only fuck things up more. Democrats believe (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that government exists to serve the people. And it turns out that democrats were right. I say were because all of that is evaporating before our very eyes, but that’s another post.

So why do republicans keep voting for shitty government? Because it allows them to be right in their belief that government blows and on a visceral level, being right is all you need. They expect government to blow, so they’re not let down when it does. They keep voting for people that offer them more of the same non-governance bullshit that keeps them poor and uneducated because they’re sadomasochistic. They’re sadomasochistic, but they’re right!

The data here is clear; the democratic way is better. It’s better for you because it’s better for your neighbor. When your neighbor’s kid has a shot at a good education and a bright future, they won’t grow up, having to resort to robbing and killing you in order to survive. It makes sense to tax corporations and the mega-fucking-rich because they use more taxpayer resources than you do. This way works!

There’s no fucking reason to vote for the “screw your community, it’s each man for themselves” platform, unless satisfying your sadomasochistic tendencies is more gratifying to you than watching your kid graduate for college is.

The budget cuts that passed this week are going to speed up our race to the bottom. Make no mistake, Obama made this happen. He backed himself into a corner when he agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts. And if you didn’t see this week coming when that happened, you just weren’t paying attention.


The most fucked up thing about this, is that Obama is turning me into a sadomasochistic voter. When 2012 rolls around, despite my best efforts in the primaries, Obama is going to be our nominee. And in November, I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for him for one single reason; the supreme court. The only thing that Obama is going to do for me, is to appoint a non-whacko to the court.


And what’s worse than the forced sadomasochism, is that I don’t get to enjoy the upside that republicans get. There’s no satisfaction in shitty government for me. It’s all pain and no gain for bitchy.


I need to figure out a way to make this sadomasochism thing work for me. Does anyone have any advice they can give me? What type of equipment should I invest in? Nipple clamps? And when I cut myself, where’s the best place to do it? Any and all suggestions are welcome!



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Being America Costs More

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Did anyone watch 60 Minutes on Sunday? If you missed it, you can watch the clip that supercharged my bitchiness here. I thought I was going to watch a clip on how US corporations use overseas tax havens to get out of paying their fair share of taxes. What I instead saw, was a propaganda piece about how the US should lower corporate taxes in order to keep jobs in America.

Oh where to start expressing my rage?

First of all, jobs will continue to leave the US as long as we have higher human rights standards. As long as we insist on safe, fair working conditions, labor will be cheaper in other places. So if you want to keep jobs in America you would have to turn employees into wage slaves, desperate to earn money in any condition. That’s what the union busting epidemic is about, but that’s another topic. As long as we have laws that protect the worker, we’re going to have higher labor rates. Period, end of story. If you want to keep jobs here, you’re going to have to be prepared to work side by side with your ten year old child for twelve hours a day.

Now that we have one implausible, bullshit argument down, let’s move to the other inane point made in this piece.

For this piece, 60 Minutes interviewed the CEO of Cisco. I give him credit for doing the interview, but everything he said was fucking ridiculous. He was talking about businesses moving to Ireland and Switzerland because they have more “reasonable” corporate tax rates. And he went onto caution the US government that it was driving businesses away by having high tax rates. Honestly, I can’t believe this douchecanoe runs a company. I would expect that a person who runs a company would have more business savvy that this. Okay, that’s not true. I actually have come to expect that people that run companies are know-nothing asshats that inherited their lot in life through luck of birth. But I didn’t always have such bitchy, low expectations of CEOs. They drove me to my low opinion of them by saying stupid shit like, “The US better lower its tax rate, or we’re going to leave.”

Here’s the deal, Switzerland and Ireland can have lower tax rates because the US is taking care of their high ticket item in terms of their countries’ budget. We essentially provide defense for all of Europe. They don’t have to spend as much on defense because we do. Does anyone honestly think that Ireland is prepared to defend themselves in a war with another country? No, of course not! Because if Ireland ever gets attacked, the US will jump right in to defend them. Why do you think the Italians or the French aren’t really leading the Libyan mission? Because the lack the tactical and operational capabilities that the US has. Like it or not, we have the strongest military in the world because we spend exponentially more of our GDP on defense than anyone else does.

Am I in love with this situation? No, but that’s how it is. We are the world’s military. And as long as that’s the case, being America just fucking costs more. Deal with it.

These asshat American CEOs who are oblivious to that fact need to bitch slapped repeatedly until they’re cured of their stupid. In their childish fantasy world, they get to drive around in a Ferrari that they paid Hyundai prices for. Idiots! Honestly, just when I’m thinking that politicians are the dumbest people in America, a CEO pipes up to disprove me.

We essentially have two options for keeping jobs in America, according to our CEOs. We can either go back to the days of treating our workers like shit in order to maximize profits, or we can seriously reduce our biggest expenditures; defense, medicare, and medicaid. The latter two go back to treating our citizens like garbage. All three would put us on a fast (er) track to giving up our position as leaders of the free world.

Is that what these idiot CEOs want? For America to become devolve? No, I don’t believe they do. I just believe that they’re incapable of seeing past the next dollar in earnings.

Being the leader of the free world isn’t cheap. And we’ve spent the last thirty years dropping corporate taxes, and taxes on the super fucking rich enough to have a pretty good idea of where the threshold is for revenue that we need to generate in order to maintain our position in the world.

The smartest thing that Obama can do right now, is to lower corporate taxes. Yes, you heard that right. He needs to lower corporate taxes, but he also needs to make the new rate a flat tax. If he took the corporate tax rate down to a flat 28% and eliminated all right offs, we would bring in more revenue. And it would be a win, because republicans wouldn’t have an argument to make against lower taxes. Right now, US corporations pay around 6.6% of total revenues. That’s just not enough to keep America, America.

Being America just fucking costs more than being anyone else.


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The Nuclear Option

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So we’re all biting our nails, waiting to see what’s going to happen with the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. And as we’re watching the devastation we can see, and anticipating the potential devastation that lies ahead, we’re justifiably discussing the merits and pitfalls of nuclear energy.

Here are some facts about nuclear energy that you may or may not know.

Banks won’t finance the nuclear power plants in America, unless the federal government guarantees the loan. Banks aren’t willing to take the risk. They don’t want to risk the massive cost overruns that are inevitable in constructing nuclear power plants. They also don’t want the litigation risks.

You know how Wall Street was happy, willing, and able to trade crap ass mortgages for ten years? Yeah, well they won’t touch nuclear power plants. What does that tell you?

So in order to build a nuclear power plant in this country, your taxpayer dollars have to back the project because financial industry analysts don’t believe they can make money on them. They don’t believe that the ratio of risk to reward is worth the trouble. Speaking of risk to reward, you must be asking yourself, “What do I get for guaranteeing the loan?”. Good question! The answer is that you don’t get jack shit because even though the federal government is guaranteeing the loan, they still award contracts to companies to build the power plants. So the company gets the contract and collects the profits without taking on a single dime of liability.

Sounds like an awesome racket to get into, right? It gets better. A nuclear power plant costs between $5B and $8B to build. Now once it’s built, do you think there’s an insurance company on the planet that’s willing to insure the fucking thing? NO! That would be batshit crazy! We know that banks and insurance companies are greedy, reckless, and morally bankrupt, but they’re not batshit crazy. So guess who takes on all of the liability when something goes wrong? If you guessed ‘you’ you’d be right! You’re poor, from being repeatedly robbed, but right! And since we the taxpayers cover any liability that may arise from an accident at the nuclear power plant, if you ever needed to sue for medical costs, you would essentially be suing yourself.

So if a bank isn’t willing to touch a nuclear power plant, and Wall Street isn’t willing to touch a nuclear power plant, and insurance companies like AIG (who will historically insure God damned anything) aren’t willing to touch it, wouldn’t one think that perhaps nuclear power is a bad idea?

Yes this is clearly a dumbass idea, which means that our government will naturally pursue it to the tune of $36B. Actually, it’s $54.5B if you add the $36B that Obama wants to add to the $18.5B that wasn’t spent out of the last budget.

Does any of this sound good to anyone? Forget what’s happening in Japan for a moment. Does using tax payer money to fund and guarantee a venture that is too dangerous for even Wall Street to gamble on sound reasonable to anyone?

Even people who purport to be pro-nuclear energy, back way the fuck off when the conversation turns to building one in their back yard.

Now I’m ready to bring the Japanese crisis into this post. Those socialist, statist, Marxist motherfuckers have building codes that are far stricter than anything we have here in America. It took an 8.9 magnitude earthquake to trigger a nuclear meltdown. We have two nuclear power plants in southern California, sitting on a fucking fault line! Those two plants can allegedly withstand earthquakes up to a 7.4 magnitude. Just so you’re clear, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake is roughly 1/15th as strong as an 8.9. Does that sound good to anyone?

Another issue is nuclear waste. We still don’t know what to do with it. Yes, we’ve figured out a way to reuse some of it but there’s still waste. France encases it in concrete and buries it. But the problem with that is that concrete eventually breaks down, even if it’s not covering uranium. Have you ever seen an industrial building that has been abandoned for a few years? Concrete needs to be maintained in order to hold its integrity so the French are going to be digging up and reburying nuclear waste in perpetuity.

I say that we spend that $54.5B on subsidizing green energy startups to develop things like the Bloom Box or more efficient solar and wind solutions. We need to stop spending our resources on energy supplies that are killing us. Whether it’s the slow death that comes with carbon emissions, or widespread death that would result from a nuclear meltdown.

There will be nuclear meltdowns. That’s an absolute certainty. So we should ask ourselves how many meltdowns make nuclear power worth it. Is one meltdown every hundred years acceptable? We know that the radiation lingers for a couple of decades, so we’re talking about elevated cancer rates for two generations of families within a couple of hundred miles. Is one every two hundred years acceptable? I’ve already seen two in my lifetime, so I find it pretty unlikely that two hundred meltdown-free years is possible. If it were, it would require a shitload of regulation and maintenance. Do you trust our government to regulate the shit out of the energy industry? Or do you trust the company running the plant to voluntarily make costly maintenance investments? Pro-nuclear republicans suddenly have so much new found faith in the government they hate, that they trust it to keep nuclear power plants safe?

Remember, Three Mile Island happened because of user error. Chernobyl happened because there weren’t enough containment measures in place. Are you so confident that it won’t happen here?

Nothing about nuclear power makes sense to me. The first nuclear power plant went live in 1954. It’s time to move past 1950s solutions. The advances we’ve made since then are staggering. Proponents of nuclear power operate under the assumption that we can’t come up with something more efficient. And they’re using their iPhones to say so, in their Facebook status updates.

I say, bullshit!  We can innovate if we decide that we’re going to. Look, we got computers in our homes in the 90s as a direct result of all the money that Reagan dumped into defense in the 80s. Those billions of dollars spend in R & D shrank the microchip down to a workable size.

If we get serious and we throw serious money at the problem, we can solve it once and for all. We always have.

 

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Nine Most Terrifying Words

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I’ve always been perplexed with politically active people that don’t believe that good government is possible. If you don’t believe that government is good, why bother to get involved?

I completely get the motivations of politicians that hate government. They want the power that comes with being in the government. It’s a great way to get really fucking rich without creating anything, or employing anyone. But the people that believe them? I find them inexplicable.

Who the fuck hears a candidate say, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'”, and thinks “that’s who I’m voting for!“? How does that make any fucking sense? He just told you that he’s not going to help you if you elect him!

What kind of person perpetually votes for a party whose mantra is the promise of shrinking the government, despite the fact that no president in the history of that party, has ever made the government even a little bit smaller? Are these people fucking idiots?

The short answer is, yes. The longer answer lies in the inherent pessimism that fuels the belief that government’s only purpose is to fuck you.

See, republicans generally come into power and make things worse than they were before they got in. And once they’ve made things worse, they take the opportunity to leverage that crisis to make themselves (i.e the government) bigger and more powerful.

Bush ignored mounds of evidence (not to mention the emphatic warnings from his predecessor) , outlining the threat that Bin Laden poses to America. The US gets attacked, and the administration used that crisis to pursue the neocon agenda of world domination through invasion and occupation.

Ronald Reagan revived fears of a Soviet takeover of the world, at a time when no one was thinking about the Soviet Union. Iran was holding fifty-two Americans hostage, and we had an oil shortage that created long gas lines. The last thing on any American’s mind was the cold war. But Reagan gave those old fears some CPR and brought them back to life. He then leveraged the fear he resurrected, to get the American people to go along with his wild defense spending that blew up our deficit. He massively cut taxes for top income earners when he first came into office, and then had to raise taxes eleven times to offset the the shortfall that he created. In classic republican tradition, those tax hikes shifted the tax burden on the middle class.

Scott Walker turned a surplus into a deficit ten minutes after being sworn in, by cutting taxes at the top and doling out government contracts to his cronies. A minute after that, he leveraged the budget “crisis” he created to decimate collective bargaining rights for public employees.

I can give dozens of examples, but you get the idea. This is an age old tactic of the republican party. Why does it work on some people? Because if you are pessimistic enough to believe that government can never work for you, fucked up government validates your world view. It makes you right! Never mind the fact that you voted for the government. You were right, and that’s all that matters. Buying into the “nine most terrifying words” theory is purely emotional.

No rational, thinking, logical person would ever accept the idea that a human (any human) will ever relinquish power that they’ve obtained. That’s never happened in recorded history. So buying into the bullshit narrative that someone is trying to get into government so that they can turn around and give up the power that comes with the office. That’s just batshit crazy. So if you’re buying into this bullshit, you’re not doing it with your mind. You’re doing it emotionally.

That goes for you too, democrats. If you believe that a democrat will give up power that his/her predecessor secured for that office, you’re not being rational. I never, not for one second, thought that Obama was going to give up any of the expanded powers that Bush snatched up. To do so would be crazy and stupid, and I was definitely not voting for someone I thought was crazy and stupid. That’s just not how I roll. I will admit that I never saw the Bradley  Manning abuse coming under this president’s watch. I knew that Obama wasn’t going to give up the power to do anything, I just didn’t think that he would use this particular power. Don’t kid yourselves, Obama is completely aware of what’s happening with Manning. In my defense, I’m no less disgusted with Obama when he does it, than I was with Bush when he did it.

Die hards on both sides vote irrationally, but the whole foundation of republicanism is based on irrational voting and perpetuating a pessimistic world view.

We have a republican congress now, whose sole mission is to make things shittier so that they can point to Obama and tell you that government sucks. And Obama is playing into their hands by not standing up to make sure that shitty things don’t get passed.

It’s a vicious cycle, and to some degree, we’re all playing our part.

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Expensive And Ineffective

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That’s republicanism in a nutshell. Expensive and ineffective describes every aspect of the republican party, but I want to focus on one specific area for this post. Union busting.

Everyone is hip to the fact that the union busting efforts by republican governors all across the country aren’t about balancing state budgets. They’re about eviscerating the democratic party. Everyone knows that with a few exceptions, the lion’s share of corporate political contributions are made to republicans, and the lion’s share of union contributions go to democrats.

A little bit of simple math, coupled with some common sense (there I go with my sunny optimism again) will tell you that the corporate contributions are significantly larger than the union contributions. Union membership in America is 12.3%. That’s if you add up all of the private sector and public sector union members. Unions ostensibly raise their political contribution money from a percentage of dues paid by that 12.3% of workers. Workers that, by the way, earn an average of 59k a year. Corporate contributions come from diverting profits to political contributions. US corporations are at this moment, sitting on two trillion dollars in cash reserves. It’s obvious where the bigger trough of money lies.

These union busting efforts are aimed at drying up the union money to political contributions. You know what that tells me? It tells me that it costs a fucking fortune to get people to buy republican. And for all of the money that’s being spent on selling republicanism, it’s still not working.

In yesterday’s post, I shared a poll that shows that most Americans would take a much more “liberal” approach to balancing our budget than our government will actually take. We see that while republican governors across the country are cutting money for education, Americans would increase the education budget. We see that Americans are willing to raise taxes on both themselves and the filthy rich.

Poll after poll shows that most Americans have “liberal” opinions on domestic issues from abortion, to gun purchasing requirements, to education and gay marriage (that poll moves more and more liberal every year). The only domestic issue where Americans skew “right”, is on the death penalty. We still have a blood lust for revenge, apparently. Most Americans aren’t interested in invading or occupying other countries. The Bush administration had to employ a major shock doctrine offense in order to get Americans on board with Iraq, and even that didn’t last more than five years. The majority of us are not interested in the neocon porn fantasy of world domination.

We are liberal on most issues, despite the shit load of cash that is being spent on selling republicanism, and making “liberal” a dirty word.

On top of the corporate contributions, there’s billions of dollars invested in a giant right wing propaganda machine. There’s Fox News, where Rupert Murdoch was happy to lose money for six years before he ever saw a dime of profit. There’s Rasmussen, a right wing polling outfit that exists so that right wing radio and Fox News can quote “data”. There’s the right wing think tanks like Cato and Heritage whose only purpose is to again, feed right wing media with lies that they can cite, thereby validating each other.

I’ve driven through cities where, when flipping through the AM dial, I’ve come across Rush Limbaugh on three different stations. Three stations carrying the same program? Why would any radio station in America carry the same programming as a competing station in the same market? Because the right wing think tanks are buying up all of the advertising on those programs, in order to ensure that those programs are all that Americans have access to. That system is finally starting to fall apart. Right wing talkers are being pulled from radio stations all across the country, finally. Nobody is fucking listening anymore.

We have a really fucking big, really fucking expensive machine trying to crank out republicans in America. But that machine is failing to accomplish it’s task. You can’t throw enough money at Americans to convince them to want to legislate’s a woman’s uterus. You can’t throw enough money at Americans to convince them to hate people for being gay (anymore). You can’t throw enough money at Americans to convince them that workers should give up their right to organize.

And you know what? The right wing corporate interests know they’re losing. That’s why they’re making a concerted effort to bust the unions. They need to make sure that no money goes to liberal voices, so that they can buy themselves a little bit more time. You think that all of these republican governors suddenly all, independently decided to launch an attack against the unions in their state? No, it’s obviously a coordinated effort. Republicanism is going to collapse. It’s just a matter of time.

Let me be clear, when I say that republicanism is going to collapse, I’m not referring to conservatism. Republicans went horribly wrong when they walked away from every single tenet of conservatism. Republicanism isn’t about smaller government. It’s about big giant government, picking your pocket at every turn.

The tea party emerged as a backlash to republicanism. It had the right idea when it started, but it went horribly wrong when the movement was taken over by Dick Armey and the Koch brothers. But I believe that true conservatives will eventually take the tea party back. Yes, I realize that I just gave the tea party some credit but I am a sunny optimist! Oh, and I look at polls.

Americans don’t want what the oligarchs want and it’s just a matter of time before they can’t fool us anymore.

Americans are not prospering the way they were in the past. And even the most politically disengaged American knows that something is horribly wrong. I think that what we’re seeing in Wisconsin is just the beginning. And I believe that defeating Scott Walker will serve as inspiration to make us realize that we do have all of the power. We just need to use it.

There is not enough money in the world to keep the robber barons in our good graces for much longer. They’re going to have to keep throwing more and more money at the problem, just to buy themselves another month, year, maybe five. But it’s all going to fall apart eventually.

And this isn’t about political parties. Obama’s approval ratings have stayed unimpressive because Americans aren’t seeing the sweeping change they were hoping for.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a democrat or a republican. Americans are going to turn on any politician that supports republicanism. The machine overplayed its hand in Wisconsin. I believe that we’re watching the beginning of the end of republicanism.

I say good riddance. I want to go back to the days of debating conservative and liberal ideas. This oligarch diversion has been bad for all of us. It’s time to move on.

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A Country Of Flaming Liberals

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No, I’m not referring to France. I’m talking about The United States. Yup, I’m just as shocked as you are, but it turns out that we’re all just a bunch of granola eating, dirty hippie liberals.

We just needed Scott Walker to help us see ourselves for what we really are. LIBERAL (peh!). Many, many polls have been taken in the past couple of weeks to assess how America feels about commandant Walker’s actions in Wisconsin. Turns out that Americans aren’t for taking away collective bargaining rights from people, to the tune of 2 to 1. Two thirds of us have a sense of decency, not to mention forethought.

Oh, but we’ve only touched the tip of the Birkenstock with that little factoid. NBC News and the Wall Street Journal commissioned a poll to figure out how Americans would balance the budget if it were up to them. Let’s start with what the pollsters presented to the sample group. They used the actual budget of the United States, more or less (you can download the actual report here if you want more detail). They broke the budget down to discretionary and non-discretionary line items and gave the respondents options for generating revenue, as well as the option to cut spending. Here’s what the respondents did:

76% of respondents cut spending by an average of $145.7 billion. They cut;

$109B out of defense
$13.1B from intelligence
$12.8B from Iraq and Afghanistan
$6.7B from veteran’s benefits
$4.6B from federal highways
$3.2B from the space program
$2.6B from medical research
$2.5B from homeland security
$2.3 from farm subsidies
$2.3B from air travel and roads
$1.8B from development assistance
$1.8B from military aid
$1.6B from the State Department
$1B from land management
$.4B from nuclear weapons
$.2B from federal law enforcement
$.2B from global health
$.1B from mass transit

But is wasn’t all cuts. They also made increases in certain areas (brace yourselves for a big whiff of patchouli);

  • $5.2B increase in job training
  • $4.6B increase in higher education
  • $3.3B increase in energy conservation/renewable energy
  • $2.7B increase in elementary/second education
  • $2B increase in subsidies to small farms
  • $1.5B increase in pollution control
  • $1.4B increase to special education
  • $1.1B increase to humanitarian aid
  • $.9 increase in science
  • $.2B increase in housing programs
  • $.1B increase to federal prisons

Fascinating, right? But it really gets interesting when you break the respondents down by political affiliation. The biggest spending cuts were made by independents who cut $195.5B out of the budget. The next biggest spending cutters were democrats, who cut $157.3B out of the budget. The “fiscally conservative” republicans were only able to cut $100.7B out of the budget. Any guesses who landed at the bottom of the budget cutting list? I’ll give you a hint – they can’t fucking balance a budget any better than they can spell protest signs. Yep, teabaggers could only bring themselves to cut $100B out of the budget.

I realize that this is getting super fucking wonky with all of the numbers, but I found this report endlessly fascinating so I’m going to continue.

Democrats were the biggest raisers of spending, but not in any meaningful (in terms of adversely affecting the overall budget) way. In fact, when it came to job training, democrats wanted to raise spending from $4B to $9.2B. Independents wanted to go higher than democrats, to $14.4B.

Every group wants to cut defense, so we’ll never see that happen in actuality. Independents cut defense more than any other group, coming in at a cut of $154.1B. Democrats cut defense by $131B. Republicans only cut defense by $56B, but they cut it!

Here are some interesting areas where all groups agreed and differed:


Ready for another dose of American granola? You know how you constantly hear that Americans prefer cutting spending to increasing taxes? Well, that turns out to be true only if they’re not looking at real numbers. 91% of respondents in this poll increased taxes by an average of $291.6B. The amount of tax increases by group looks about how you would expect;

  • Teabaggers – $188.2B
  • Republicans – $229.9B
  • Independents – $305.5B
  • Democrats – $338.5B

All of the groups favored a progressive tax rate (meaning that the more you make, the higher the percentage you pay), but republicans and teabaggers were much more forgiving to the higher tax brackets than independents were. Predictably, democrats really stuck it to the rich.

On every single issue of taxation (estate, corporate, personal, etc) each group raised taxes. Yup, even teabaggers. Only 17% of republicans favored the estate tax breaks that Bush enacted and Obama extended. Let me repeat that so that it really sinks in; only 17% of republicans support the current estate tax levels.

On the issue of capital gains, both independents and democrats want to either raise the percentage of taxation or treat capital gains as income, thereby raising the percentage of taxation! Only teabaggers (68% of them), had a decisive majority that don’t want to raise capital gains. Republicans were divided with 49% against raising taxes, 46% for raising taxes.

Every group agreed that oil companies don’t need the tax breaks they’re currently enjoying, and they would all repeal them.

Every group overwhelmingly agreed that they wanted to fix the social security shortfall by increasing they payroll tax limit from the current level of $106,000 to at least $156,000. 38% of respondents went further and removed the cap entirely and chose to take social security contributions on all money earned. There wasn’t much deviation on this among the different party affiliations. Every group overwhelmingly chose to raise the retirement age, but only to 68. Only 1/3 were willing to go up to 70.

I can keep going, but I won’t. You should definitely download the report from the link above if you want to see more.

Let me summarize what I got from this report, other than the fact that America is made up of liberals (as defined by Fox News).

First and foremost, I see that a strong political ideology creates blinders that make it harder to get things done. That applies to both the left and the right. That being said, left wing ideology doesn’t seem to be as debilitating as right wing ideology does. Over and over again in this report, independents were much closer to democrats than to republicans. Teabaggers were consistently way out there.

When it comes to coming up with solutions to problems, nothing should be off the table, unless you have historical precedent that demonstrates failure. You shouldn’t let your ideology create your facts. It should be the other way around.

It’s clear that one side does love their unicorns more than the other does. Republicans are emotionally attached to the “trickle down” theory that is demonstrably false. But, they’re not as attached to it as our government is. When they were presented with the budget in detail, they all deviated from that ideology to a greater extent than any administration in the past thirty one years has.

But the thing that most struck me about this poll is that our government isn’t representing us. Not any of us. If you had to put a direction on it, you could make a case that our government is to the right of all of us. “Right” as defined by a greater deference to corporations and corporate interests. But that isn’t really an accurate description of what’s happening here. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that what we’re experiencing here is an oligarchy.

Oligarchy

[ol-i-gahr-kee]
–noun, plural -chies.
1. a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.
2. a state or organization so ruled.
3. the persons or class so ruling.

We have a government that serves only the interest of its donors. And last year, when the Citizens United decision came down from the supreme court, the system insured that it’s donors will never be the people. The supreme court gamed the system and completely locked the citizenry out of it. In 2008 when Obama ran, he kept repeating that 90% of his contributors were ordinary citizens making small contributions. While those statements were completely accurate, they didn’t tell the whole story. The contributions made by 90% of his donors represented 50% of the total amount that he raised. The other 50% came from corporate interests. Believe it or not, a 50-50 ratio is astonishing. Corporate contributions typically eclipse private contributions so what Obama accomplished was amazing.

But it will never, ever happen again. The supreme court made sure of that. If we don’t all work to pass laws that make the public financing of campaigns mandatory, we well never be represented by our government. None of us, conservative or liberal, will get the opportunity to be heard or represented.

If we don’t change the system, we’re fucked. We need to stop focusing on the democrat or the republican in the race. Party affiliation is irrelevant because both sides can only get their campaigns financed by entities that don’t give a shit about you or me.

The ideological lines between right and left are drawn between having faith in corporations versus having faith in the government. Both sides are wrong. The growing wealth disparity on the country has proven that corporations aren’t going to do right by the workers. And Citizens United has insured that good government isn’t possible.

So if you’re having a political debate with someone from a different political persuasion, and you’re taking the pro-corporate or the pro-government side, your point sounds like nonsense to the person you’re talking to because it is nonsensical. You’re having the wrong debate, and you have to realize that the team you’re on isn’t on your side.

Obama is not a great president because the system won’t allow him to be. He has to fellate Wall Street if he wants to have a single democratic congressman or senator elected during his term. Democrats idealize Obama’s presidency at their own peril. Look at what happened to republicans when they idealized Bush’s eight year fucking nightmare. That didn’t turn out to well for republicans, not to mention America and the world.

It’s time to play for your own team. Fuck the politician you’re spending your time or money on. Use that energy to change the system. We need to get public financing of campaigns on ballot measures in every state across the country. We need to stop having stupid fights amongst ourselves and unite around our own self interest. America will never embrace its inner hippie (again, as defined by Fox News) until we do.


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The Remedy To The Walker Dictatorship

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Here’s the deal – Walker is going to win in Wisconsin if he doesn’t blink. I hate that is it so, but it is. The only way that he won’t successfully take away collective bargaining rights for public employees, is if he backs down. I’m not saying that it’s not possible that may back down, but if he doesn’t he will get his way.

Honestly, if I were him I wouldn’t back down at this point. He’s already ensured that he’s going to be a one term governor. He’s also already ensured that he’s going to get a very high paying lobbying job when his one term is over. There’s no reason for him to back down so going after him is the wrong strategy.

But don’t worry, it’s not hopeless. There is a a winning strategy to ensure that this doesn’t happen all across the country. Wisconsinites must swiftly move to recall every member of the state house and senate that voted to strip public workers of their bargaining rights. They need to take a page out of Darrell Issa’s (he orchestrated the recall of Grey Davis in California) book and start collecting signatures to recall everyone that is eligible for recall right at this moment. I know that Wisconsin has a provision that says that a legislator must fuck up for a full year before they can be recalled, but there are plenty of people supporting Walker that have served for a year. Walker’s bill has passed the house, so there’s already a list of names to start with. If Wisconsin can get enough names to instigate a recall of even one or two state house members, there’s some chance that they can peel off a few republican votes in the senate.

Let’s be honest about the current situation – averting this vote, means having faith that democrats can hold out. When was the last time a democrat held out and stood on principal? Oh yeah, that would be Russ Feingold, who Wisconsin voted out of office last November! But aside from Feingold and a handful of others, the odds of democrats holding their ground are historically slim. No, banking on democrats to have balls is not going to turn out well for us.

Other republican governors that were talking about union busting are already losing their stomach for proceeding down that road, so public pressure has done a lot of good. A swift move to remove Wisconsin legislators that helped to make this happen will put the fear of god in every pro-union busting piece of shit all across the country. Here’s the thing – although Walker is assured a big fat Koch brothers paycheck at the end of all of this, the legislators that supported him aren’t. They key here is to go after the low hanging fruit. No politician in their right mind is going to sacrifice themselves so that some other asshole can get rich. No, they’re far more interested in amassing wealth and power for themselves. Making it clear that we won’t give them the opportunity to get rich if they go against the will of the people should remedy this situation.

You’ll never get to be a Koch whore if you’ve only served for a year in government because a year isn’t long enough to make you worth anything to them.

Trust me on this one, going after Walker is futile. Counting on democrats to stand firm is foolish. The only way to win this is by recall, recall, RECALL.

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Low Self Esteem

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I’ve given a lot of thought to why the hell anyone that depends on a paycheck to survive, would possibly support the busting of a union. The only explanation that I can come up with, is that they have low self esteem. This explanation actually works to explain several otherwise perplexing opinions.

On any given day, Rush Limbaugh spends three hours riling up his listeners by telling them that they should hate people that have more than they do. “Fuck the people with pensions! You don’t have one, so fuck em!”. That’s his mantra, day after day. Fox news is a little more subtle, but the message is basically the same; the problem always lies with the people that have what you don’t, unless of course, we’re talking about the richest 2% among us. In the case of the mega rich, you need to fellate them, until they generously trickle their wealth down to you.

I get why the commentators that take this stance. They’re being generously paid to do the bidding of corporate America. But the working class people that buy into this? They obviously suffer from low self esteem issues.

Let me explain. Every single one of us knew a bully in our school days. And every single one of us remembers that when confronted, the bully crumbled like a republican economy. On the day that someone finally confronted the bully, we all realized that he/she was the most insecure person on campus. A bully chooses bullying because it’s easier and less thoughtful than self-improvement. Why put the time and effort into becoming someone that you can feel good about, when shitting on someone else offers so much instant gratification?

Fighting to get a pension for yourself takes a lot of work and organizing. Hating people that have pensions is much easier! You don’t have to organize. You don’t have to educate yourself. And you don’t have to confront your employer, which requires self esteem. The instant gratification of hating someone that has something that you don’t, simply requires having a small mind and a bitter attitude. It’s easy. And voila! You get a little boost in your mood without having to do any work.

And the reason why you don’t want to do the hard work required to get what the people that you hate have? Say it with me, it’s low self esteem.

This also explains that Sarah Palin phenomena. Think about, the thing that you hear most often from her supporters is that “she’s just like me”. And they’re right. She’s ignorant, and too lazy to remedy that ignorance by learning things. Her supporters know that they’re in no way qualified to occupy an office in the white house, but having someone like them some so close makes them feel better about themselves. The “reasoning” is this; she doesn’t know anything, just like me. And if she can make it into the white house, I have a shot.

What those people failed to consider, is that her ignorance isn’t what got her so close (although it didn’t hurt). Her fuckability is. Poll after poll shows that the majority of her supporters are men. Here’s a newsflash for Sarah Palin’s ignorant supporters; if you’re ignorant and you weigh 300 pounds, Bill Kristol’s penis is never going to pick you to be a vice presidential candidate. But don’t let that deter you. I understand that supporting her helps you feel better about your low self esteem issues.

Low self esteem is what makes people believe the unbelievable. Like the inexplicable belief that government workers are taking us all to the cleaners, with their above market compensation packages. Seriously, how can you believe that? If that were true, everyone would be clamoring to work for the state of Nevada, instead of Google. Why are technology professionals fighting over low paying Google jobs, when they can get rich on a government salary? You have to be an idiot to actually believe that. Trust me, I battle the behemoth that is Google to hire talent every single day. The fact of the matter, is that Wisconsin state workers’ total compensation is 5% below that of their private sector counterparts. That’s right, their total compensation (including health benefits and pensions) is 5% under what the market dictates.

I’m not even going to bother posting all of the statistical data that shows that government jobs pay less than private sector jobs. You can find that for yourself, and it defies common sense anyway so it’s not worth my time. So I’m going to go the other way, and ask you to suspend your self esteem for a moment. Let’s all hate government and union workers together, by accepting the premise that they’re all getting fat on our backs. If you add up all of the state and federal employees, government would by far, be the biggest employer in America. If all of those government entities were grossly overpaying their employees, wouldn’t that drive up your wage in the private sector? Wouldn’t your company be forced to compete with the government and it’s bloated compensation structure in order to get anyone to work for them?

Okay, I can’t keep this up. My self esteem isn’t low enough to accept this bullshit premise. I’m worried if I keep it up, my IQ will go down and that I will become angry and insecure.

I would like to say to working class people that support Scott Walker – please work on your self esteem. I know it will be hard at first but in the end, you and your family will benefit from the strong belief that you deserve better.

I would like to say to Fox news – you should encourage your viewers to fight for more, because this will help your rich benefactors in the long term. When people make more money, they have more to spend on your rich friends’ products.

And lastly, I would like to say to Rush Limbaugh – you need to find a way to be happy. I know that your viagra fueled limp dick and your giant ass are bummers. But you’re filthy fucking rich! You can afford to pay people to get you viagra, and you can afford to pay women to fuck you! See the glass as half full, Rush. You’re not doing your listeners much good when you’re this angry.

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Parity

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I’ve always loved that word. I love the way it sounds, and I love what it means.

[par-i-tee] – equality, as in amount, status, or character; equivalence; correspondence; similarity; analogy

Parity is the single most important ingredient in what made America great back in the day. We didn’t start this country off with parity. Contrary to what Michele Bachmann will have you believe, our founding fathers did not fight to free the slaves that they owned (holy shit, that woman is an idiot!). Nor did they advocate for their wives’ right to vote and right to work. No, parity was more abstract back then. It was an ideal, espoused in our founding documents. The actuality of parity is something that was fought for, and earned throughout the evolution of our nation. I believe that those ideals of parity that were fundamental in our founding documents, were the motivational tools that kept Americans fighting for equality over the course of our evolution. We are now in an era where parity is being systematically dismantled in our country. I fundamentally believe that in any given situation, the best possible result is achieved when two opposing forces with parity are forced to compromise in order to get to the end result. The greatest era in American history was one in which the government butted heads with corporations, and achieved compromise that resulted in the greatest expansion of our economy that we’ve ever seen. Thank you, FDR for showing us how to get it right. We no longer have that parity between corporations and government. We now have a situation where both entities are on the same side, leaving Americans with no one to fight for us. The situation in Wisconsin is the perfect illustration of the further breakdown of parity. Make no mistake, what Scott Walker is trying to do in Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing a budget. It’s about creating more disparity. Just to recap, Scott Walker was sworn in as governor of Wisconsin a month ago. At the time of his swearing in, his state had a budget surplus thanks to his his democratic predecessor. Here’s where the story starts to sound really fucking familiar. This asshat, Scott Walker took that surplus and spent $140 million dollars in a month. He gave the wealthiest Wisconsinites $67 million in tax breaks and spent the rest on kickbacks to cronies, thereby creating a budget crisis. A crisis that he wants to remedy by (say it with me) crapping on working people. This situation would be pretty fucked up if it were just about a reverse Robin Hood menacing working people in Wisconsin, but that’s not what he’s doing here. He’s not asking Wisconsin state employees to make sacrifices in order to balance the budget that he fucked up this year. He’s asking them to forever relinquish any bargaining power they have. This is about the age old GOP tradition of busting unions. Unions that by the way, were formed in order to remedy the disparity between American workers and corporations that existed early on in our country’s history. Before unions, the average worker faced 12 hour work days, 7 days a week. But that isn’t as bad as it sounds because they got to work right next to their kids. It really was a golden age of quality time with the family. You see, because there was no parity between workers and companies, people got fucked. Corporations have no feelings or compassion because they’re not people. Corporations are motivated purely by profit, which doesn’t leave much room for human rights’ issues to prevail unless people organize and created a modicum of parity. Regardless of what you do for a living, you have benefited from the existence of unions. You wouldn’t have a weekend if it weren’t for unions. You wouldn’t have vacation time were it not for unions. You wouldn’t have dozens of other rights that you take for granted if it weren’t for unions. I’m not saying that unions are perfect. Far from it. Unions definitely have their fair share of corruption and embezzlement. But they create a level of parity. Without unions, labor’s power is eviscerated. And when one side is eviscerated in any negotiation, we all lose. How you personally feel about unions is irrelevant. I would hope that you would have the common sense to understand eviscerating workers is a bad idea, just as eviscerating corporations would be a bad idea. We need parity. I am utterly flummoxed and disgusted by anyone that doesn’t understand this. Listening to right wing media this week has been a particularly vomitous  experience. The constant barrage of insults against working people that just want parity is not something that is comprehensible to me. You wanna know who has the right to negotiate their working conditions, benefits, and termination packages? Every single fucking asshat on Fox news that is telling you that unions blow, that’s who. You wanna know who else has a shit ton of bargaining power? Really fucking rich people, regardless of their level of competence. That’s right, Crazy Carly Fiorina negotiated the $40 million dollars that she ultimately got paid to leave HP, because she sucked. Can you, in your wildest dreams, imagine sitting on one side of a negotiating able saying, "And if you need to fire me, I will need $40 million before I leave"? I can assure you that every single Fox News "personality" has negotiated generous exit packages for themselves, in the event that they get fired. The fact that they have disdain for people who want what they have is appalling, but it’s also the very foundation of Fox news. You shouldn’t listen to people that tell you that you don’t deserve what they have. That makes you a fucking idiot and a tool for a machine that places no value on you. You also shouldn’t listen to anybody that wants to eviscerate one side in any power struggle. That person is a tunnel visioned ideologue that can’t understand the value of parity.

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