Wake up GOP and Conservatives and Quit Being Idiot Tea-Baggers!

http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainstream-Demographics.aspx#1

Don't let the title fool you.

Only 28% of U.S. adults admit to being tea-baggers. 26% oppose. 38% neither support nor oppose. 8% don't give a f***.

49% of tea-baggers identify themselves as GOP compared to.....
...... a whopping 28% of all U.S. adults who are willing to admit that they are Republicans.

72% of all U.S. adults are either Independent (40%) or Dems (32%).

Here's a shocker....
70% of tea-baggers say they are Conservative but only 40% of U.S. adults say so. 59% of U.S. adults are either Moderate (38%) or Liberal (21%).

And look, another huge surprise....
19% of tea-baggers earn less than $30K a year
...... 55% make more than $50K

More surprises....
62% of Republicans and 63% of Conservatives have a favorable opinion of tea-baggers, but......
WHOOPS!
More National Adults overall(40% v 37%), Independents (41% v 37%), and Moderates (51% v 24%) have an UNFAVORABLE opinion compared to a favorable one.

Wake up you Republicans and Conservatives before you disappear completely into the cultural oblivion and societal garbage heap which is most certainly the final destination of Queen Tea Bag and her moronic movement.

Bill Maher's New Rule: You can't use the statement "there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year"

New Rule: You can't use the statement "there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year" as a threat if there was no cooperation in the first half of the year. Here's a word the president should take out of his teleprompter: bipartisanship. People only care about that in theory, not in practice. The best thing that's happened this year is when President Obama finally realized this and said, "Kiss my black ass, we're going it alone, George W. Bush style."

Read his full blog post here.

American Pie....That You Shouldn't Want

Don't get me wrong. I think the American religion of capitalism has some merit. I've done ok by it, I guess. But it also seems to me to be fraught with failure; failure that is rigged into it for most of us no matter what we want to believe about unfettered and free capitalist markets that create opportunities for any of us to be rich.

Believe in tinkle-down economics and corporate benevolence if you like, but the reality is that the vast majority of us are only so much chattel in the execution of an economic model that sees people as expendable resources. That's not rain splashing on top of your head. More on that in a minute.

How else can our indifference and downright hatred and contempt from some segments of our population be explained? I'm no theologian, but I don't think it can be explained as part of any mainstream religion.

No, IMHO, it comes from what I consider to be a terribly misguided resurgence of Randian capitalism and what seems to be a built-in contempt in conservatism for anyone not meeting their litmus tests and the definition of "success" in a capitalist sense. It all seems to me to breed an ugly culture of greed and amorality that spawns idiots like Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin who preach their sermons of lies and hatred. They make tons of money and grow their personal wealth by duping certain people in this country into thinking that things like universal health care and financial market regulations are bad ideas. In simple terms, their religion of capitalism puts greater value on money and individual wealth than it does on human life or protecting the rest of us from undue investment risks taken on by people who get all the reward and bear none of that risk.

(BTW and before anyone takes offense at my penchant for using the word 'dupe', it means to deceive. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Even the brightest people in the world can be deceived.)

Unfettered capitalism also dupes Americans into believing that we can buy our way into wealth and happiness. Who was it, after all, that made credit cheap and told us the only way to be happy was to stuff our lives with more and more stuff!?! Probably wasn't the liberal left.

Unfettered capitalism also seems to create a sense of entitlement among American consumers. Strange use of that term, entitlement, I know. What I mean is that we have allowed ourselves to be deceived - duped - into believing that we are entitled to cheaper and cheaper consumer goods so we can stuff our lives with more and more stuff without one wit of consideration for how, where, and by whom those goods are produced, distributed, and delivered to market. It was this video that got me thinking about that today.

The high priests of this capitalist religion - the "captains of industry", "Wall Streeters", and, yes, neo-Randians, so-called fiscal conservatives, even Libertarians - are more than happy to supposedly "serve the market demands", right? I mean, why not? If that's what Americans want then, dammit, we're Americans and that's what we're going to have. All that's being done is the servicing of the demands of the marketplace, right? If that's what people want, that's what we'll give them. What's wrong with that?

Fair enough. I'm ok with that....to a point.

If cheaper and cheaper is the siren song to wealth and happiness, how's that going to be possible in a country that produces fewer and fewer consumer goods? How's that possible where the middle class *is* the primary consumer marketplace and where that part of our society is under the most stress and may even be shrinking?

If everything has to get cheaper - and in the case of food, nothing could be worse, really, since the cheapest food products tend to be the least healthy for us - what's a good capitalist to do? Well, there's the always-popular answer of lowering labor costs. Turning people into chattel. It's either continue to ship middle class jobs overseas so you can pay slave wages to workers, or risk pricing your goods and services out of the market. Now that's good capitalism at work!

The very class of people capitalists need in order to have at least a domestic market - the middle class - are the very people getting hurt the most right now. Who's doing that? It's precisely and unequivocally the fault of unfettered and unregulated capitalism and capitalists.

I mean, you're not going to blame the poor are you?

And certainly you can't blame the government for over-regulation because the RRs - Randian Republicans - successfully deregulated financial markets when they passed GLB.

I suggest you think about this the next time you hear the ultra-whack-wing-right mouthpieces like Beck and O'Reilly and Limbaugh and Palin - or elected officials with "Waterloo" agendas - criticize an administration for not yet having fixed a broken economy. Are we that eff-ing stupid to think that 8 disastrous years can be remedied in one?

Think about this the next time.....
....a jobs number comes out
....someone complains that America doesn't manufacture enough and our trade balance is all out of whack
....someone claims that what's needed is less government regulation and not more
....someone points out that the middle class is shrinking and we're headed toward some banana republic state where you have only a small percentage of wealthy people living off the backs of an impoverished population.

Exactly where are jobs supposed to come from in an economy that long ago - and in the name of corporate profits and shareholder returns - shipped most of its manufacturing overseas where there's nothing close to our definition of a middle class?

And exactly how many "services" jobs can we reasonably expect companies to create and sustain in our economy? Oh wait, many of them now exist overseas, too. Why? Because labor is cheaper there. Remember that the next time you make a "language skills" complaint about the customer service agent who answers your call. It wasn't the liberal left who outsourced that job from Minneapolis to Mumbai. Thank your friendly neighborhood capitalist.

So what's the answer to our current economic mess? Is it more government bail outs to free market capitalists who want nothing to do with government involvement in their lives and their businesses? F***ing hypocrites.

Is it protectionism? Is it isolationism? Can't keep lowering operating expenses and outsourcing jobs to Asia-Pac countries and then close off our borders to the importation of those foreign-made goods. What would happen to the income statements of our benevolent corporations then?

Is it more regulation or less? History can teach us a lot if we just take the time to study it. The first Great Depression seems to have taught us very little.

I don't profess to know the answer.

What I do feel pretty confident that I know unequivocally is this.....
....it wasn't the so-called universal health care socialists who think it's time to rein in insurance companies who put money and profits ahead of humanity and humane treatment of others
....it wasn't the advocates for social equality and gay marriage rights who keep wondering why anyone else gives a f*** about them and their desire to get hitched
....it wasn't the "nut-job" environmentalists and tree-huggers who wonder why we can't see the reality that oil barons are simply protecting the last few drops of a disappearing resource from which they will wring every last penny at our expense
....it wasn't all those worrisome waves of illegal immigrants taking all those prized lawn-care and domestic housekeeping jobs from true middle class Americans
....it wasn't the inner-city poor luxuriating in lives of crime-free-front-stoop Doritos-munching and drug dealing
....it wasn't the peaceniks and war protesters who want the government officials brought to justice who dragged this once great country as low as it could go by admittedly torturing people
....and it sure as f*** wasn't the the middle class that put us into this mess.

No, no, no. It was..................................................................................nah, I don't need to say it. You know who it was. Whether or not you'll ever admit it out loud....now that's a different question. ;-)

One Person's Perspective on the Federal Debt as a % of GDP

What's been the history of the Federal debt, what's been happening over time, and who's been in power when it happened?

Initial searches weren't very efficient and it was hard to find a reasonable summary. Here's one of them: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html. The web site owner claims to be an economist who does this in his spare time. Take it for what it's worth.

Ever the skeptic, I decided to check further and to account for Congress and the role they play. I decided to create my own chart. It's attached. The Sources at the bottom include a link to the actual Federal debt tables used to generate the underlying line graph.

Conclusions? Here are mine.
1. Federal debt as a % of GDP went through the roof due to WWII

2. Federal debt marked a steady decline after WWII regardless of who was in the White House and through 35 years of a mostly Democratically-controlled Congress until.......

3. Reagan, a terrific actor (which some mistake for intelligence and oratory skills) and famous co-star to trained monkeys, got elected...yes, I hate the stupid f***...
AND Republicans took control of the Senate

This next point is, IMHO, probably the single most important fact to remember about all of this.

4. The Republican-controlled 106th Congress takes Ronny's "smaller government" religion to its fatal extreme by passing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in November of 1999 which is signed into law by another RWMF and career politician, Bill Clinton.

For those who need a little history review, GLB repealed many of the regulatory safeguards which had been put into place by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was the federal government's response to the unfettered and unregulated bankers who caused the * FIRST * Great Depression.

Go back further (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html) and understand how Glass-Steagall was coming under serious attack during Reagan's administration in 1986-1987....at the same time a former J.P. Morgan director and life-long disciple of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, was being made Fed Chairman.

"In the spring of 1987, the Federal Reserve Board votes 3-2 in favor of easing regulations under Glass-Steagall Act, overriding the opposition of Chairman Paul Volcker. The vote comes after the Fed Board hears proposals from Citicorp, J.P. Morgan and Bankers Trust advocating the loosening of Glass-Steagall restrictions to allow banks to handle several underwriting businesses, including commercial paper, municipal revenue bonds, and mortgage-backed securities."

Do you see those words, "mortgage-backed securities"?

5. The upward trend continued on Bush 41's watch and with a Democratically controlled Congress (Dems can be such pussies...or are they just RWMFs of a different stripe? Both, I'd say.)

6. Yes, Clinton was in some ways the benefactor of a booming economy and, yes, some credit for reducing the Federal debt has to go to a Republican Congress
(In case anyone would like a quick primer on how the Federal budgeting process actually works, the roles various branches and departments play, etc., see http://useconomy.about.com/od/fiscalpolicy/p/Who_budget.htm)

7. Finally, it was without a single shred of doubt in my mind or any possibility for any sort of fact-based denial that a Republican-controlled Congress and a half-witted Republican son of a Texas oilman is who put us on this disastrous financial path.

The list of fiscal failures since 2001 is long, but we can start with cut taxes that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans while waging 2 wars off the books. Add to that, the bottom dropping out of an unregulated financial services sector based too heavily on an overly-speculated real estate market that had so much credit and investment capital tied to it and what did those geniuses think would happen? It leads to a reality in which Wall Street and RWMFs everywhere get all the reward with none of the risk and we taxpayers are left to bail out the whole friggin' mess....

My point is the current pathetic state of our economy and the federal budget is something that began long before Obama came into office, before voters turned Congress back to Dems, and really began when Rs were in charge and is rooted in the desire of RWMFs everywhere to deregulate and get rich.

I have no problem with fiscal responsibility, but to think that a president and Congress can fix the mess of previous administrations over night - or even in a single year - just isn't realistic. And I don't think we'd be in this mess if the justifiable and now obviously needed regulations and oversights of the financial services industry had not been repealed.

If anyone has a better plan than what is being done now, I'd like to hear it. Was allowing all the TARP recipients, GM, and any other recipients of federal money to fail the better plan? In a perfect Randian world, I guess the answer would be, "Yes."

p.s. Snowboard Cross racing at the Olympics is way cool!

Additional Sources
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/hist.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122156561931242905.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60U09L20100131
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/02/the-big-bank-bailout-bill/
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/glass_steagall_act_1933/index.html
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/bush-tax-cuts/ignore.cfm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html

Fox News Looses Last Bit of Credibility with Palin Hire

As if the last scintilla of any real news journalism credibility hadn't already been sacrificed in honor of Beckwits everywhere, they've finally gone and pulled the trigger on someone who is undoubtedly the dumbest person ever to get into national politics; someone even dumber than W. It'll sadly and probably be good for ratings, though. Got to give them that. They know how to feed crap to and make billions from people who seem all too willing to eat it up without question and with a giant spoon.

Hiring Palin to somehow be a respectable and reputable commentator on something she knows nothing about? Are they kidding? Oh wait, she was governor, but that didn't seem to suit her, either. But then, there is all of that hard work she puts into reading books, magazines and newspapers in order to keep up with what's happening in the world, you betcha'.

IMHO, the only people Fox News should still have any credibility with are the couple in the Twinkies/HoHos wedding cake photo that circulated in email a few years back. I honestly can't see how any other segment of the population doesn't see through their charade.

So, good f****** luck with that. We all might as well subscribe to the The Globe for additional in-depth and investigative news, shut down all the other news companies, and stop all funding of public news organizations. Fox has Sarah and that's all we need to know.

Comparing Reid and Lott is Right-Wing Grasping at Straws

To compare Reid with Lott is disingenuous.

And in case anyone else shares this with you, the words "light skinned Negro" never, never, NEVER appeared together in Reid's statement. If one wants to question whether or not Reid is somehow a racist, they should at least start with a truthful and accurate quote. Let me help.

This is what the Wall Street Journal reported at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126316391149723551.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop:
Mr. Reid, who supported Mr. Obama's candidacy, said in private remarks during the campaign that the country was ready for a "light-skinned" African-American president with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

That's a world away from saying "light skinned Negro" and it's an entire universe away from Lott honoring a man who ran for president on a platform that included segregation.

Let me put this into a formula that anyone can understand: segregation = racism = hatred = stupidity.

-> Reid supported Obama then and supports him now.
His comments were the ill-chosen words of at least two generations ago and meant as a compliment. No one, including me, is arguing that they weren't wrong by today's standards of an advanced and enlightened civil society, nor were they within the standards of what we commonly refer to as political correctness. Standards of political correctness, I might add, most conservatives seem to rail against at every turn. In fact, I'm a little surprised there aren't actually cheers coming from the Right for his lack of p.c. Trying to have it both ways, maybe?

-> Thurmond wanted to segregate blacks.
It's a fact that it was part of his platform for president. Lott's words on Strom in 2002 were, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/09/lott.comment/)

It's clear that Lott liked Thurmond, was proud of him, and thinks America would have been better had Strom been elected president in 1948. A segregated America would have been better????? Job discrimination, lynchings, poll taxes, and segregation would have been better???? Is that not racism??? See http://www.gallup.com/poll/7444/gallup-brain-strom-thurmond-1948-election.aspx for how far we've come since 1948 and some insight into why Lott's comments were so egregious. I really can't fathom how someone in Lott's position could have made such remarks if he wasn't at least somewhat racist himself.

So, just how plain confrontational does the Right have to want to be to even begin to compare Reid to Lott? I think that's grasping at straws.

Little Green Footballs Blog: Why I Parted Ways With The Right

I've never considered myself to be anything close to a conservative. I have even less in common with extreme right-wing thinking, so don't misinterpret this posting because of the title.

I'm compelled to post this link mostly for the benefit of all of my conservative friends. It's your wake up call.

/span/a/divWhy I Parted Ways With The Right

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_Right

You and anyone else who still considers themselves as conservatives better take back control of your beliefs and your movement. If there's even the slightest shred of intellect left in conservative thinking - a trait completely lost by your current lot of self-proclaimed leaders and media mouthpieces - then you need to start calling out the nuts for who and what they are. Your silence is at the very least disappointing apathy and at the worst complicity.

You are allowing whack-jobs, nut cases, and downright hateful people to usurp your causes. Only you can do something about it; otherwise, enjoy the social fringes as your numbers continue to dwindle.

And let's not pretend - if you're a conservative you are a Republican, and your numbers are falling.

See http://pewresearch.org/pubs/773/fewer-voters-identify-as-republicans,
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/parsing-the-polls/21-percent.html,
and
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/16/democratic-national-committee/democrats-claim-only-20-percent-americans-call-the/)