Because they don't:

Even if all of the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire as scheduled, the projected cost of the Bush tax cuts to the federal budget over the next ten years is $3.9 trillion, an average of 1.4 percent of the country’s total economic activity (GDP) per year. Those asking for more permanent tax cuts continue to justify the cost, claiming tax cuts create jobs.

But their analysis ignores what actually happened during the economic cycle that began in March 2001 and ended in December of 2007—which almost exactly coincides with the Bush presidency and the implementation of the Bush tax cuts. This period registered the weakest jobs and income growth in the post-war period. Overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967. Women reversed employment gains of previous cycles. And for African Americans, the worst job growth on record was matched by an unprecedented increase in poverty.

Given this incredibly weak record, it is astounding that some conservative members of Congress held up—and eventually voted against—the Obama administration’s economic stimulus and recovery package because it did not contain additional permanent tax cuts. The anemic Bush economic cycle directly contradicts the idea that those tax cuts delivered broad-based economic growth and job creation—never mind the promise of long-term economic growth so quickly squelched by the onset of the recession beginning in December 2007.

Read the report for yourself.

Labels: economic death watch

I hear you, Michael Corleone. Just when I think I'm out, some right wing asshat pulls me right back in.

Some of you may recall Jon Stewart tearing Eugene Delgaudio a new one on the Daily Show last April. Delgaudio is a man who plainly has issues and even a layman such as me can make a pretty persuasive case that this man is about two glasses short of a pitcher of Koolaid.

Delgaudio is the District Supervisor for Sterling, VA and he's renowned for his bizarre fundraising letters in his ongoing battle against teh gays. Because of the very nature of the internet, with one mouse click leading to another, don't ask me how I crossed paths with this waste of trace elements but the important thing is I did.

Remembering that the Rude Pundit is famous for subscribing to Tony "Who's the Girl, Norman?" Perkins' Super Duper Prayer Team over at the Family Research Council, I went to this asshat's official website and took a brief survey. Despite the fact that I answered all six questions about gay rights the way you'd expect a liberal bisexual like me to answer them, I was immediately inundated with congratulatory emails from Degaudio's organization, Public Advocate (his unofficial job title). I thought it prudent to save his letters.

Now, before I continue, let me draw one distinction between genuine homophobes like Delgaudio and what I call (thank you, Bobby Gibbs) the professional homophobes. The pros are simply currying political or religious favor. They honestly couldn't give a shit if Elton John married David Furnish because they know it has no impact on their marriage. After all, you're responsible for the upkeep of your own relationship regardless of sexual orientation. That's just common sense and even your more pragmatic right wingers would admit as much if you were to bend elbows with them at a Bennigan's.

People like Delgaudio are something else entirely. His Twitter account that often screams about "the thought police" is good for a cheap chuckle but in order to get a more comprehensive view into his particular brand of unhinged lunacy, you simply have to subscribe to his fund raiser newsletters. Delgaudio is the most dangerous kind of homophobe: The kind that not only believes with all his heart that the LGBT community is out to get him, but even imagines stuff out of whole cloth.

Take, for instance, this Bulwer-Lyttonesque excerpt from last spring that was reproduced in full by Steve Clemons of the Washington Note:

One stormy night I drove to a mailshop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses. I'd heard something was up and wanted to see for myself.

As I rounded the final turn my eyes nearly popped. Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses.

Trembling with worry I went inside. It was worse than I ever imagined.

Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling.

My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers. And still more petitions were flying off the press.

Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, "Delgaudio what are you doing here?" Dozens of men began moving toward me. I'd been recognized.

As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, "This time Delgaudio we can't lose."

Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right. This time the Radical Homosexuals could win...

But wait. Delgaudio's particular insanity, like fine wine and leather, just improves if not mellows with time. Because his latest fund raiser email is not only chock-a-block packed with the usual homophobic lunacy, it even comes with 40% more Freudian slips!

First the Homosexual Lobby rammed their disastrous Thought Control Bill into law.

---

The Homosexual Lobby is whipping up a tsunami of political momentum.

---

Jurassic, if we don’t act now, the Homosexual Lobby will ram it right down our throats.

---

If the Homosexual Lobby rams through the Gay Bill of Special Rights, the federal government will hand control of the American economy over to radical homosexuals.

---

If Public Advocate is going to to mount a successful lobbying campaign against the Gay Bill of Special Rights, I must have you sign the petition to your Congressman by clicking here.

---

Hmmm... Ramming. Ramming down our throats. Whipping. Mounting. Is anyone else getting turned on by this steamy, manly rhetoric?

But wait, it gets even better because Gene then figuratively pulls up a chair, skooches over and tells us in no uncertain terms how his crusade is affecting him personally:

Honestly, sometimes my job feels like the loneliest in the world.

It seems as though I have so few allies in my fight to defeat the Gay Bill of Special Rights. Every day, as I walk through the halls of Congress, I feel the eyes of radical homosexuals on me. Their hatred is obvious, and they are everywhere. They seem to have gotten to nearly everyone who was weak or wavering...

Now, granted, I'm not exactly what you'd call a purveyor of adult gay literature. But I would imagine the seedier examples would sound a lot like Delgaudio's weekly begs, sort of a "Dear Editor" contribution to Ramrod Monthly.

Indeed, in his fictions, poor Eugene seems to be surrounded by manly, longhaired, earringed, confident, forceful studs whose eyes slither over him. It is dark and stormy (or spermy. Who knows what his muse is holding back?), making one ask what he's doing skulking around warehouses looking for pro-gay literature during dark, stormy nights in the first place.

The funny thing is, Delgaudio said in his April newsletter that "homosexuals" make up only 1% of the population yet in his sweat-drenched fantasies, they always seem to surround him, as if he, I dunno, attracts them. Plus, we haven't the slightest idea of what percentage of the US population is gay, lesbian or bisexual on account of so many of us remaining in the closet. But I think most of us can agree that gays alone make up more than 1%. They don't all live in P'town, San Francisco, Fire Island and the Castro.


But making up facts is the least of Delgaudio's evils because this man is not only unhinged and living in some delusion that sounds like a John Waters version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers but this particular man is an elected official.

It wasn't that long ago that tech skills were touted as the key to landing a job in the "new service economy" or the "new information economy" or whatever it was called in any given year by Thomas Friedman, whose own job is about dead trees. And yes, for a while, anyone with the right degree, or even a willingness to learn, could get into IT.

But the days when someone like me, who was able to get an entry-level programming job simply by transferring my secretarial skills into the IT department working for the department heads, expressing a desire to get into programming, and starting a couple of graduate courses, are over. I was extraordinarily lucky, even by the standards of 1988. I had a basic knowledge of programming concepts from struggling through an Introduction to Pascal course, but I required training in the 4GL that was being used, and the VAX operating system on which it ran. I learned as I went. I stopped grad school because I had to learn how to do my job. Two years later I saw that PC programming was the way to go, taught myself C out of a book, and got a job with a smalll investment consulting company writing C programs, working with the database application Paradox, and doing some Novell Netware administration -- all learned on the fly, on the job. Three years later I took a job that in short order I grew to hate, working on voice response systems. But it was walking distance from home, there was no commuting time, and I was able to go back to school and have it paid for. I stuck it out for a year and moved to another small software VAR, where I wrote Visual Basic programs after teaching myself THAT out of a book before even starting the job, and where I got into basic HTML web sites in 1996 -- again, teaching myself out of a book.

IT was like that in those days. The ability to learn quickly, a willingness to just jump in, initiative, some smarts -- that was all you needed.

Not today. Today, you can teach yourself out of a book till the cows come home. You can have skills in fourteen different programming languages, and if you are missing the fifteenth, you are out of luck. Ads for IT people contain a laundry list of skills that no one person can possibly have, because they involve completely different kinds of left brain/right brain dominance. You'll see ads for someone who has experience in a dozen programming languages, who's an experienced network administrator, a computer security expert, a graphic designer, a technical writer, and a trainer. And that's an ad for one job.

None of these jobs exist, of course. They are designed to have nobody qualify for them so that companies can wail that there just aren't enough qualified people and they simiply HAVE to outsource the wrok to countries that pay a dollar an hour at most.

And so, while politicians of both parties are continuing to laud education and "retraining" as a panacea for the unemployment situation, as they continue with the old chestnut that it's simply a question of workers gaining new tech skills, those who have lost their tech jobs, especially if they are over 40, might as well be auto workers:

“We are talking about people with very particular, advanced skills out there who are at this point just not needed anymore,” says Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business and economic research organization. “Even in this sector, there is tremendous insecurity.”

Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.

Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.

“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.

Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.

Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.

“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”

Perhaps companies are still chasing workers because they have absolutely no idea what to look for. You are not going to get a graphic designer and a guy who can bang out thousands of lines of bug-free code in a day in the same person. Network administrators usually don't have experience with technical writing. A C# programmer isn't going to be able to design your logos or write your marketing copy. However, a 49-year-old C++ programmer can get up to speed with C# in a matter of weeks simply by just starting to do the job.

But of course companies don't think like this. The hiring process tends to be run by human resources departments the staffs of which have no idea what the difference is between a programmer and a network administrator, between a web designer and software engineer. Resumes are culled out by keywords, and if yours doesn't have every keyword they're looking for, you are out of luck.

I contrast the plight of IT workers with my own situation over the last two years. Looking back, I'm astonished at how spectacularly unqualified I was at the time I was hired for the job I currently have. Oh, I had some passing familiarity with the process of the job from my previous one, but for the last three years on my previous job, most of what I did was build web sites, not the kind of medical applications for which I interviewed. I remember interviewing for this job, and answering questions with "No....no....I don't have experience with that....no, we had a guy who built that...no...no, but I did do...." I walked out of there thinking "Well, that was a waste of two hours", and two weeks later I had an offer.

As it turns out, the department was building a staff largely from scratch. Some people who couldn't handle the move to data capture systems left, others were hired, and I am after a mere two years the #3 person in seniority. The learning curve has been at times like climbing Mount Everest. I'm largely balanced between left brain and right brain, with slight right brain dominance. I gravitate towards writing and words and emotion rather than numbers and logic. Science programs on television make me glaze over, but I'll watch intently a program on how to build a kitchen cabinet. This balance allows me to do more quantitative work than a purely right-brained person would be able to do, but it does not come naturally. But I was fifty-three when I took the job, I am fifty-five now, and I've not only been able to learn almost from scratch new tools, new concepts, and also how to lead groups of people, but I've also won two employee awards for doing so. My experience makes every single argument that companies make for not hiring in the US ring completely hollow.

For better or worse, our society is organized around work, much of it around working for someone else. If we are evolving into a race to the bottom, in which the companies that used to employ us are chasing ever-cheaper, ever-more-exploitable workers, then this notion of work is going to have to change. I'm not sure what it should or will become, but simply demonizing those that corporations have left behind, or believing the claims of "We can't find qualified people", is not the answer.

Labels: employment, Information technology, personal musings

If all Muslims in this country has to proclaim loudly to the skies, 24 hours a day, for the rest of their lives, how outraged they are about the 9/11 attacks, then shouldn't Christians have to do the same about "Burn a Quran Day" about to be held in Gainesville, Florida (it's always Florida, isn't it?) next weekend?

Since 9/11 many American Christians have been asking why Muslims who oppose Islamist radicalism don't do more to counter it. Today I suspect more than a few Muslims are looking at Christians in America wondering why Christians don't try to dissuade the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, led by Pastor Terry Jones, from hosting Burn a Quran Day.

What is the responsibility of religious believers in a given faith to engage fanatics advocating ideologies of hate while claiming to act in the name of this faith?

Quran burning does not equate with murdering thousands in terrorism. However, these are similar in being ideological expressions of hatred which identify themselves with Abrahamic faiths better known for their emphasis on God's mercy toward all humans.

Both are independent movements evoking the name of far larger, broader religions. The Dove World Outreach Center is an independent church. Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda is an independent movement. Just as millions of Christians peacefully attend churches with no affiliation with the Dove World Outreach Center, millions of peaceful Muslims have no affiliation with al-Qaeda and associated movements.

Among Muslims there are emerging efforts beyond press releases to engage Islamist fanatics and Muslims, especially young Muslims, at risk of radicalization. Examples include the Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim counter-radicalization think-tank in the U.K., and the video Believers Beware: Injustice Cannot Defeat Injustice, released this summer by the Muslim Public Affairs Council based in Washington, DC, featuring Muslim leaders speaking Muslim-to-Muslim against religious fanaticism.

[snip]

There is a mess brewing inside Christendom. Some American Christians might be thinking, "Terry Jones and his church - ahem, his "church" - have nothing to do with me because I am Catholic/Methodist/fill-in-the-blank." And yet the only thing a flood victim in Pakistan, likely Muslim, is probably going to hear about this story is, 'American Christians put their energy and resources into Quran burning, not into helping us in our hour of dire need.'

Moreover, if American Christians don't try to reach out to Terry Jones, then who will? Press releases will not be enough.

Word.

I don't know about you, but I haven't heard a peep out of any mainstream Christian denomination about "Burn a Quran Day." I guess that means they condone it. Sauce, goose, etc.

Labels: double standards, hypocrisy, Religious Intolerance

Here's all you have to do to fix Social Security:

Done.

(source)

Labels: Social Security

I'm actually somewhat surprised that we actually still celebrate Labor Day, given it's history of having been created by unions to celebrate union workers. Yet the very same people who have been excoriating unions for the last thirty years will be out at block parties and other holiday events extolling the working man while ignoring their own histories of outsourcing jobs (Carly Fiorina) or calling those who have lost their jobs due to downsizing "spoiled" (Sharron Angle) or railing against labor unions, even though unions have next to zero clout in labor negotiations these days.

Today is the day when many people have their last barbecue, their last swim, their last outing of the white pants before the fashion police come and beat them with sticks for wearing white after Labor Day. Here in New Jersey, it's yet another beautiful day, as it's been all weekend, with the kind of bright blue skies that set off the remaining oak trees -- a color that only exists when the humidity is low and the air is clean enough of pollutants. There's a certain forced gaiety about Labor Day weekend that doesn't exist on the other summer holidays. Memorial Day's meaning gets lost in its symbolism as an unofficial kickoff to summer. Independence Day shows us relaxed and still looking forward to another month of summer. But Labor Day is a winding down, a reminder that we still have to paint the wrought iron railing in yet another vain attempt to keep the rust away, that soon the heat will cut on at night, that we can actually sleep at night without an air conditioner or a fan in the window, and find ourselves staring at the ceiling because it's just too darn quiet.

What Labor Day isn't about anymore, is about working people. Last week The Hill ran a piece about the "blitz" that business groups plan against Democratic candidates today:

Business groups plan to go on offense against vulnerable Senate Democrats in their backyards to mark Monday's Labor Day holiday.

Local groups will target Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Rep. Paul Hodes, the Democrat running for Senate in New Hampshire, and Kentucky Senate Democratic candidate Jack Conway in their states over their records on labor-related issues.

Local chapters of groups like the National Federation of Independent Business, state Associated Builders and Contractors and other commerce and retail groups will hold events on Monday targeting the incumbents and candidates, particularly on their stance on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, or "card-check").

Because nothing demonstrates the true spirit of Labor Day by big spending by greedy corporatists who are making record profits and keeping those profits in their pockets like using the terminology of war against candidates who might want to do something for those who have to work for a living.

Yesterday I read either a column or a letter to the editor -- I'm not sure which -- opining whether most of us would give up being able to dress casually for work and instead put on a suit and tie if it meant working from 9 to 5 and being home by six. Mad Men may be about people caught between a postwar world of conformity and the upheaval to come, but as usual with pop culture, the Mad Men phenomenon has been all about the style -- the clothes, the drinking, the constant cigarettes, the furniture. It's a stunningly-wrought set piece, to be sure. But lost amidst all the lamenting of the bygone days of Canadian Club and Parliaments are people like Christopher Hitchens, now dying from esophageal cancer, the primary risk factor of which is the combination of alcohol and nicotine. It's hard to argue that these days Don Draper is one iota happier because he gets to leave work at 5.

And yet, for those of us lucky enough to have jobs, but find ourselves leaving the house by 7 and getting home at 6:30 -- and that's during a slow time when we aren't working every weekend -- there's this constant feeling of having no life. We find ourselves in this never-ending cycle of feeling thankful that we still have a job even if it means we stumble home every night, eat a dinner of reheated Trader Joe's food, watch Countdown and maybe Rachel Maddow and then go to sleep to repeat the same thing tomorrow; then saying to ourselves, "Yeah, but that's what THEY want you to think!", and then looking around and seeing that we have a roof over our heads and being thankful again.

Why has it come to this? Why are employer and employee now enemies? Perhaps conformity is no longer the price we pay for being employed, but having to constantly prove our devotion to the company above all else in our life is. And yet we are the lucky ones, those of us who have jobs doing something meaningful, with supervisors who may be tough but are usually fair, with co-workers who are diverse, interesting, and intelligent people. What about those for whom the mind-numbing sameness is of getting out of bed every day with nowhere they have to go, nothing they have to do, other than scour the job boards for eight hours in the hope that something will show up for which they are completely qualified, and hoping that their resume comes over the fax first?

Is this what the two possible paths in America in the 21st century are -- having no life because you have no time or having no life because you have no job?

Sometimes I go with some colleagues to a local Fuddruckers for lunch. At the Fuddruckers, there is a woman who is clearly in her seventies. She works there. Her job is to bus tables. Every time I go there I leave a tip on the table and hope she's the one who gets it. Every time I go there seeing her simultaneously breaks my heart and frightens me to death. Because this is the future that Americans are going to vote for in November -- a future where you work into your seventies and eighties busing tables at Fuddruckers -- and that's if you're lucky.

A year ago, Alan Grayson took no end of shit from Republicans and the media for saying that the Republican answer for health care was "Don't get sick, and if you get sick, die quickly." Grayson was right, but he didn't tell the whole story. Today it's "Don't get old and don't lose your job, and if you do, die quickly."

Republicans demonize the unemployed because they think (rightly so, unfortunately) that if they can make the unemployed yet another hated "other" (like illegal immigrants or their latest favorite boogeyman, Muslims), they can distract the attention of the still-employed DOWN the economic ladder insted of realizing that the rich guys are stealing the few singles and fives they still have their wallets. Wages are flat, but more health care costs are being passed on to workers. Corporate profits are up, but hiring is down.

We live in a country where everyone was told from birth "If you work hard and play by the rules, you too can be a millionaire." If the hatefulness of their words didn't infuriate me so much, I would feel sorry for the unemployed truck driver, the out-of-work machinist, the guys bussed to the Glenn Beck rally by an organization funded by giant corporations and industrialists. These are people who believed the bullshit, the nonsense that everyone gets an even shake -- and now find themselves looking for someone to blame that it isn't true.

Today is Labor Day, and unions lie in wreckage around us. People who are out of work are getting ready to vote for the very people who would yank the very unemployment benefits that allow them to avoid homelessness. The Koch brothers aren't demonized by these people, but those with even less are. The reality that George Carlin spoke bitterly about in 2005 has come to fruition, making me think he died just so he wouldn't have to see multimillion dollar media "personalities" like Glenn Beck be greeted as practically the reincarnation of Christ by these people.

Labor Day always has a certain melancholy to it. This year it seems more melancholy than most.

Labels: america R.I.P., personal musings, rant

Eugene Robinson:

According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an "electoral wave," it's a temper tantrum.

It's bad enough that the Democratic Party's "favorable" rating has fallen to an abysmal 33 percent, according to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. It's worse that the Republican Party's favorability has plunged to just 24 percent. But incredibly, according to Gallup, registered voters say they intend to vote for Republicans over Democrats by an astounding 10-point margin. Respected analysts reckon that the GOP has a chance of gaining 45 to 60 seats in the House, which would bring Minority Leader John Boehner into the speaker's office.

My guess is that with a decided advantage in campaign funds, along with the other advantages of incumbency, Democrats will be able to mitigate these prospective losses -- perhaps even relieving Nancy Pelosi of the hassles of moving. But there's no mistaking the public mood, and the truth is that it makes no sense.

The nation demands the impossible: quick, painless solutions to long-term, structural problems. While they're running for office, politicians of both parties encourage this kind of magical thinking. When they get into office, they're forced to try to explain that things aren't quite so simple -- that restructuring our economy, renewing the nation's increasingly rickety infrastructure, reforming an unsustainable system of entitlements, redefining America's position in the world and all the other massive challenges that face the country are going to require years of effort. But the American people don't want to hear any of this. They want somebody to make it all better. Now.

If Americans want to know why Washington is dysfunctional, they should look in the mirror. Ever since Ronald Reagan sold them the perfect free lunch of supply-side economics, Americans have bought hook line and sinker that you can have everything -- increased spending, tax cuts -- and it's all free, or at the very least, it doesn't matter, because the magic hand of God will make sure it all works out and that even the lowliest janitor will someday, by sheer dint of hard work, be invited to join the captains of industry for brandy and cigars in the wood-paneled room at the restricted country club. Any sane person would have realized that this was horsepuckey -- and many of us did. But today, even though the actual social policies of Ronald Reagan would make him anathema to the very teabaggers who extol his memory, his ghost still permeates Republican policies.

That's where it began, and the final nail was put into the coffin of America not even with the election of George W. Bush, but in 1984, when Walter Mondale stood up in front of the assembled delegates at the Democratic National Convention and a nationwide audience, and said "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."

For the record, here is what Mr. Mondale said twenty-six years ago. Substitute "Bush" for "Reagan", and he could be talking about 2008, and on into today:

One last word to those who voted for Mr. Reagan.

I know what you were saying. But I also know what you were not saying.

You did not vote for a $200 billion deficit.

You did not vote for an arms race.

You did not vote to turn the heavens into a battleground.

You did not vote to savage Social Security and Medicare.

You did not vote to destroy family farming.

You did not vote to trash the civil rights laws.

You did not vote to poison the environment.

You did not vote to assault the poor, the sick, and the disabled.

And you did not vote to pay fifty bucks for a fifty-cent light bulb.

Four years ago, many of you voted for Mr. Reagan because he promised you'd be better off. And today, the rich are better off. But working Americans are worse off, and the middle class is standing on a trap door.

Lincoln once said that ours is to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What we have today is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. And we're going to make a change in November. Look at the record.

Reagan Record

First, there was Mr. Reagan's tax program. What happened was, he gave each of his rich friends enough tax relief to buy a Rolls Royce - and then he asked your family to pay for the hub caps.

Then they looked the other way at the rip-offs, soaring utility bills, phone bills, medical bills.

Then they crimped our future. They let us be routed in international competition, and now the help-wanted ads are full of listings for executives, and for dishwashers - but not much in between.

Then they socked it to workers. They encouraged executives to vote themselves huge bonuses - while using King Kong tactics to make workers take Hong Kong wages.

Mr. Reagan believes that the genius of America is in the boardrooms and exclusive country clubs. I believe that the greatness can be found in the men and women who built our nation; do its work; and defend our freedom.

If this administration has a plan for a better future, they're keeping it a secret.

Here is the truth about the future: We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time. These deficits hike interest rates, clobber exports, stunt investment, kill jobs, undermine growth, cheat our kids, and shrink our future.

Whoever is inaugurated in January, the American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan's bills. The budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up. And anyone who says they won't is not telling the truth to the American people.

I mean business. By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds.

Let's tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

There's another difference. When he raises taxes, it won't be done fairly. He will sock it to average-income families again, and leave his rich friends alone. And I won't stand for it. And neither will you and neither will the American people.

To the corporations and freeloaders who play the loopholes or pay no taxes, my message is: Your free ride is over.

To the Congress, my message is: We must cut spending and pay as we go. If you don't hold the line, I will: That's what the veto is for.

Now that's my plan to cut the deficit. Mr. Reagan is keeping his plan secret until after the election. That's not leadership; that's salesmanship. And I think the American people know the difference.

And that, my friends, was Walter Mondale's fatal mistake, just as it was the mistake of the president for whom he was vice-president: Too much honesty, too much faith in the intelligence of the American people.

Walter Mondale went on to lose spectacularly, winning only his home state (and that within a bare 4000 vote majority) and the District of Columbia.

That is the intelligence of the American people.

You'd think that Democrats would have learned from that. I realize that people who lean left tend to imagine a world that could be, the very shining city on a hill that Reagan only talked about but did little to achieve. We like to think that people are basically good, that their better natures can be appealed to even in times of crisis, that great things can be accomplished when we are just honest and true and work together. All this shows you what kind of chumps we are. Because Republicans know better. For every image of a gang of ironworkers marching down to Ground Zero from their work site with tears streaming down their cheeks becasue they want to put their muscles towards doing what they can to help, for every white person who stood side by side with black Americans fighting for equal rights in 1963, for every man who has helped escort women into women's health clinics, for every Aaron Feuerstein, who continued to pay his employees even after his factory burned down, there are a hundred people, their faces twisted with hate, sitting in their comfortable homes, listening to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and others blaming someone for their plight. During the Reagan years it was the nonexistent black welfare queen in the Cadillac. Then it was "sixties values." Now it switches from day to day between immigrants, Muslims, and the scary mysterious guy in the White House.

Republicans know how the American human mind really works. Lee Atwater certainly knew it. Here how Atwater cut his hate teeth in his native South Carolina:

Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican candidate Floyd Spence in his campaign for Congress against Democrat Tom Turnipseed.

Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by "independent pollsters" to "inform" white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP. He also sent out last-minute letters from Sen. Strom Thurmond telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm America and turn it over to liberals and Communists. At a press briefing, Atwater planted a "reporter" who rose and said, "We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment." Atwater later told the reporters off the record that Turnipseed "got hooked up to jumper cables" - a reference to electroconvulsive therapy that Turnipseed underwent as a teenager.

Atwater was Reagan's boy all the way.

Atwater's public contrition before his death of brain cancer in 1991 may have washed away his sins in the eyes of Christians, but as long as his horrific legacy lives on, I hope that if there is a hereafter, he finds himself tormented there. Because Lee Atwater begat Karl Rove and Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers and the Swift Boat Liars and Fox News.

And yet, Democrats still insist on turning the other cheek, no matter how many times the fear and loathing tactic of Atwater Christ and his loyal disciples works. John Kerry insisted that the American people were too smart to believe the lies of the Swiftboaters. He was wrong. Walter Mondale believed he could win by telling the truth. He was wrong. Barack Obama believed that the birthers were so out there that their crazy conspiracy theories didn't warrant a response. Now a retired general has signed on with them.

The tactics work because Americans want them to. It isn't so much that we want to be afraid, but we respond to fear. We want fear to be assuaged. Republicans have achieved success by simultaneously tapping fear and promising instant gratification. That Republicans have a lower positive rating than Democrats do at the moment seems to only demonstrate that. Two years ago Barack Obama was elected with as big a mandate as any president has had since 1964, and he has governed as if Republicans won. And he's still going to get his ass kicked by losing the legislative branch in November. Because Americans won't wait. Americans have the attention span of a gnat. They stood idly by and watched Republicans get us into this mess and said nothing. But now that it's wrecked, and the other guy isn't cleaning it up fast enough, they're ready to hand over the keys to the town drunk -- not because of the understandable reason that he's been doing the town drunk's bidding for two years, but because he hasn't fixed EVERYTHING. I'd be right there if it were the first reason.

Labels: American Idiots

It has always seemed odd to me that so many so-called conservatives who hate government, hate civil service workers, and hate anything government does to help people, are so eager to get in there and get a government paycheck themselves.

In the case of Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (Hypocritical Wingnut Party), the hypocrisy and the double standard are elevated to an art form, because her household is ALREADY supported by a federal pension:

Sharron Angle, the queen of Tea Party extremism, may be the worst hypocrite in a political party that never fails to take hypocrisy to new levels. Angle’s political positions are well documented: she wants to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and practically the entire social safety net, except when it applies to her. Angle has no job of her own at the moment and is living off her husband Ted Angle’s federal pension. Ted Angle worked for the Bureau of Land Management for 25 years and I’m sure his pension is well deserved, just like the 400,000 people in Nevada who deserve the Social Security benefits that they receive after paying into the program all their lives.

The idea that people are too dependent on the federal government to provide for them is the keystone of Sharron Angle’s campaign, yet apparently she cannot support herself without the federal government. Of course like many other detestable Republicans, her hypocrisy does not end there. Prior to the Reid campaign illuminating Angle’s own reliance on the federal government, Angle tried to attack Reid for the benefits he will collect through his retirement account that he enjoys as a Member of Congress.

Nevadans deserve this lunatic nimrod if they vote for her. The problem is that she's going to have influence that far outstrips her junior Senator status. And this is the price we pay for Harry Reid being so utterly useless.

Labels: double standards, hypocrisy, Teabaggers, wingnuttia

Let's make some brilliant breakfast pancakes for Reclusive Leftist. Whole wheat, of course. With blueberries -- the last of the season.

Labels: bloggers

This is Kevin Morris' mugshot. Who is Kevin Morris and why am I posting this? Because this is righteous justice served when a drunken right wing cum stain goes on an anti Muslim tirade. Morris walked into the Fire and Ice Hookah Lounge in West Haven, CT and began spewing racist and anti Islamic invective at the patrons. For the most part, they ignored him. Then Morris made the mistake of trying to throttle the bartender. That's the point when the mostly Muslim and African American patrons got emotionally involved.

Anyone who's ever worked in a restaurant with a liquor license for a day learns one rule: You never fuck with the bartender, even if for no other reason than because s/he's the one making the drinks.


So let's all raise our glasses and index fingers and give Mr. Morris a good ole fashioned "Ha ha!" from Left Blogtopia.

I guess people are supposed to just vote blindly for Jan Brewer and Sharron Angle because of what they blather. Because being asked questions seems somehow "unfair" to stupid, moronic, ignorant candidates who might have to actually talk about their policies on the spur of the moment rather than just spout babbling talking points.

First it was Sharron Angle saying that reporters should only ask the questions her campaign wants them to:

Now, after her meltdown during her most recent debate where she couldn't talk about her own policies, Arizona governor Jan Brewer says she won't do any more debates:

Incumbent Republican Jan Brewer said Thursday she has no intention of participating in any more events with Democrat Terry Goddard. She said the only reason she debated him on Wednesday is she had to to qualify for more than $1.7 million in public funds for her campaign.

"I certainly will take my message in a different venue out to the people of Arizona," she said.

Brewer said she has been in elective office for 28 years, and Goddard has held office for nearly that long. "I think it's pretty defined what he stands for and what I stand for."

Anyway, Brewer said, she believes the debates help Goddard more than they benefit her.

"Why would I want to give Terry a chance to redefine himself?" she said.

Brewer conceded that her performance in Wednesday's debate, and her refusal to answer a question from reporters afterward, was not well-handled. That includes an opening statement when she lost her train of thought and went silent, and walking away after the event rather than answering questions about her prior statements about headless bodies in the desert.

Brewer blamed part of her post-debate activities on her gaffe in her opening statement. The governor also said she presumed reporters would want to talk to her about some of the issues raised during the hour-long, televised debate.

"All you guys were doing and talking were beheadings, beheadings, beheadings," the governor said. "That is something that has stuck with you all for so long, and I just felt we needed to move on."

The subject came up during an exchange in which Brewer said unions are to blame for financial fallout over illegal immigration, calling on Goddard to disavow unions' support because they have called for boycotts of the state.

Goddard responded that it is actually Brewer scaring off tourists with comments about headless bodies being found in the desert, for which there is no supporting evidence.

Brewer insisted later that she has been misquoted. "I never said 'Arizona,' and it's unfortunate that it was construed as 'Arizona.' "

It's hardly surprising that Angle and Brewer would be baffled that they don't get a free pass when they show that they don't know a damn thing. These people want to be able to just spout whatever horsepuckey pops into their heads -- spoiled Americans....beheadings....unemployment is useless....with absolutely no consequences. After all, Sarah Palin gets away with spouting meaningless babble composed entirely of disjointed talking points, why shouldn't they?

And indeed, that's an interesting question. There's no quantifiable difference between the kind of dangerous, ridiculous nonsense spouted by Angle and Brewer and that spouted by Palin -- except that Palin's comes out of a younger, more physically attractive package. You'd think that two women who have reached middle age in our society would have recognized that double standard already.

But the larger picture is that these Tea Party candidates are all about the sloganeering. It's like their minions who talk about wanting to vote for someone who "loves the Constitution" or "will govern by the Constitution" -- when most of them don't even know what's in it. They don't feel they should have to be coherent, or defend their policy plans. After all, Sarah doesn't have to, and she gets LOTS of fawning attention.

Labels: ageism, Republican id-driven two-year-olds, Teabaggers

I've always found Cenk Uygur to be a bit of a blowhard. It's one thing for me to set up a blog because I need to blow off steam, and rant and rave in print. It's quite another to do it as a broadcaster. I'm not one for yelling on radio, which is one reason I'm not crazy about Ed Schultz. It tends to become a question of who yells the loudest, and whoever loses their head loses the argument. I do enough yelling myself, thank you very much. And talking about defense spending only leaves the door open for Republicans to say that you oppose national security and don't respect our troops.

But when it comes to the Republican (and yes, the White House) plans to gut Social Security, only yelling is going to get through to people.




It's really too bad that Cenk loses it here, because he really gets to the crux of what has happened to the American people: We paid into Social Security assuming the good faith of the government to pay Social Security benefits, and now we're being told, "Sorry...we spent it all and we can't pay it back. Tough shit. You fucked up...you trusted us."

I wouldn't have gone right to defense spending, not without concrete examples such as the $9 billion that went completely missing in Iraq and no one in our government -- not one Republican, not one Democrat, certainly not the Bush Administration -- seemed to care. Because without concrete examples of the waste and corruption that pervades our military contracting, you leave the door open to the Republican reptilian brain pokes of "You want to leave us vulnerable" and "You don't support our troops." There's a good way to demolish those arguments too, but you can't do it while you're yelling. And Cenk really blew it here. After all, these stories may be just breaking now, but there's plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting.

But the fact that he's used to a Webcast, where he can do pretty much whatever he wants and may not be ready for prime time doesn't change the very valid and important point that he made: that when the government borrows from China, it's expected to pay it back. But when it borrows from its own people, there's no obligation.

The answer is not to privatize Social Security. After all, the guys into whose hands they want to deliver it are the very same ones who developed the practices that ran the country into the ground, then said they needed a government bailout, and are now spending the money on bonuses...and they say THEY can't pay it back either. As everyone who has an IRA or 401(k) knows, not only are returns not guaranteed, but hanging onto principal is not guaranteed. Unless watched like a hawk, these guys will churn an investment account, charging commissions and fees every step of the way, buying and selling things that most of us don't understand, until you find that not only has your account not made a dime in ten years, but that you have less than you had before. And this is what they want to do with Social Security?

The whole "We can't pay it back" argument demonstrates the contempt that our government, ever since Ronald Reagan started raiding Social Security to pay for tax cuts, has for its own people. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 raised the withholding taxes paid by employees and employers, for the express purpose of funding baby boomer retirement. WE paid that increased tax, even as we knew that they were just going to steal it. And steal it they did.

In 2000, Al Gore talked about a "lockbox." The only thing that made the concept ridiculous was that the money was already gone, and had been for years. But the idea that the Social Security surplus should sit there and be used for the purpose for which it was collected received nothing but laughs from the media and from Republicans, who knew that whatever was in there could very easily be distributed to Bush family cronies and the rest of the 1% who already have almost half the wealth in this country. If the lockbox idea wasn't already dead when Sandra Day O'Connor handed the presidency to George W. Bush on December 12, 2000, it was dead the evening of September 11, 2001. Because that night, in the face of a tragedy, that cokehead Larry Kudlow, who to that network's eternal shame, has a show on MSNBC's sister station, CNBC, was on TV grinning from ear to ear and crowing happily that this meant an end to any and all talk of a Social Security lockbox.

ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE to address ANY long-term problems with Social Security funding (which don't kick in for another thirty years under the WORST of circumstances), is to lift the cap. Or RAISE the cap. Right now, Social Security is only withheld on the first $106,000 of income. Raise it to even $250,000 and the problem is solved. But of course then those who already have more money than they can spend in twelve lifetimes might have to pay a bit more for the benefits of being able to live and be rich in America. And we can't have that, now, can we.

The other day I was talking to a colleague who had just returned from a month visiting her parents in China. She told me how much corruption there is in China. She said that there are the very rich and the very poor, and the government is entirely in the pocket of the very rich. She said the deterioration has largely occurred in the last ten years. It is in those ten years that China has been accelerating its march from communism to socialism and now towards capitalism. She said capitalism has NOT been good for her country outside of the very rich. Newsweek reported in June that China has a growing white-collar underclass of educated young people who can't find jobs. We like to crow in this country that as China has moved away from Marxism, it looks more like us. If life was better in China under even the last vestiges of Maoism than it does now in a more American-looking capitalist system, what does that say for that system?

We're seeing it in the faces of people like Congressman McEwen and would-be Senators Joe Miller and Sharron Angle -- a society in which the rich live in armed fortresses to protect themselves from an increasingly large, increasingly poor, increasingly desperate rabble.

I'm going to post this video from George Carlin as often as it takes and as long as I can find it on YouTube without it being taken down:

Labels: Cenk Uygur, China, Greedy Republican Bastards, social Darwinism, Social Security

Restoring Truthiness 10-10-10.

Labels: I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions, Stephen Colbert

I really may have to start watching Glee.

(h/t)

Labels: music, sheer awesomeness, television

Michael Joseph Gross, who used to LIKE Sarah Palin, changed his mind after talking to people who have actually had dealings with her:

Ah, yes, THAT'LL solve the country's problems -- elect a cruel, hostile, vindictive, atttention-seeking, willfully ignorant pathologically lying Heather as president.

Labels: batshit crazies, cruelty, liars, Sarah Palin

So President Doing The Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting a Different Result still thinks that more business tax cuts are going to spur hiring:

With just two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks - potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars - to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll-tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research-and-development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States.

Administration officials have struggled to develop new economic policies and an effective message to blunt expected Republican gains in Congress and defuse complaints from Democrats that President Obama is fumbling the issue most important to voters. Following Obama's vacation and focus on foreign policy in recent weeks, White House advisers have arranged a series of economic events for the president next week, including two trips to swing states and a news conference.

"We'll continue to do everything we can, understanding that recovery will require persistent effort. There are no silver bullets," senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said in an interview Thursday. "At the same time, we have to make clear our ideas and theirs, and the fact that the Washington Republicans, having helped create this recession, have attempted to block our every effort to deal with it."

And they will continue to do so. From the very beginning, the Administration has implemented economic policy designed to try to ward off Republican criticism (which comes anyway) and which relies on Republican arguments that if you just shovel enough cash into the pockets of already ridiculously wealthy corporate executives, that they will share it by hiring people. What on earth makes them think this? Certainly not the world of reality:

Anyone wondering where all the economy's jobs are might want to look into piggy banks of the world's biggest companies.

Cash is gushing into companies' coffers as they report what's shaping up to be the third-consecutive quarter of sharp earnings increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money and stuffing it under their corporate mattresses.

Non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have a record $837 billion in cash, S&P says. That's enough to pay 2.4 million people $70,000-a-year salaries for five years. For context, 2.2 million to 2.8 million jobs were saved or created by the $862 billion stimulus that President Obama signed into law in February 2009, according to a report released in April from the Council of Economic Advisers.

Rather than investing in their future, companies are piling up cash and collecting practically zero interest on the money, hoping there will be a better time to invest later.

Barack Obama could come up with a plan to cut business taxes to zero, eliminate the Department of Education, the FDA, the EPA, and every other government agency that Republicans say "stifles business", and they would STILL call him a socialist communist Muslim terrorist. For nearly two years we have seen an Administration completely in thrall to Wall Street in the form of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, to the worst elements of the Republican Party, and to ConservoDems who care more about keeping their government paycheck than about doing what's right. The tragedy is that he's going to pay a heavy price for selling out the middle class this November, and the even worse tragedy is that he's going to respond by shoveling even MORE cash into the pockets of already rich corporate executives.

The slogan of the Democratic Party and this president this season is "We suck but they're crazy." Sorry, but that just won't cut it. Perhaps it's time to just sit back, figure we had a good, if too-short run, grab the popcorn, and watch as it all falls apart. Because there is no one in power who will stop it.

Labels: America's Future, Barack Obama, corporatism, Democratic sellouts, futility

BP owns this country:

BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company says a ban would also imperil the ambitious Gulf Coast restoration efforts that officials want the company to voluntarily support.

BP executives insist that they have not backed away from their commitment to the White House to set aside $20 billion in an escrow fund over the next four years to pay damage claims and government penalties stemming from the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. The explosion killed 11 workers and spewed millions of barrels of oil into the gulf.

The company has also agreed to contribute $100 million to a foundation to support rig workers who have lost their jobs because of the administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium. And it pledged $500 million for a 10-year research program to study the impact of the spill.

But as state and federal officials, individuals and businesses continue to seek additional funds beyond the minimum fines and compensation that BP must pay under the law, the company has signaled its reluctance to cooperate unless it can continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf accounts for 11 percent of its global production.

Shorter BP: Give us everything or the Gulf of Mexico dies.

We used to call this "blackmail". And it used to be illegal.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP, corporatism, greed

It really astounds me the way the teabaggers are painting Barack Obama as some kind of Marxist, eager to remake America into a collectivist paradise.

We should only be so lucky.

Instead it seems we have yet another figurehead, doing the business of his corporate masters, no doubt with visions of eight-figure paychecks in the future dancing in his head.

Do with this what you will:

Indeed, PhD toxicologist Ricki Ott noted in a New York Times Op Ed that dispersants like Corexit can persist in the ocean for decades:

[Dispersants] can linger in the water for decades, especially when used in deep water, where low temperatures can inhibit biodegradation.

Some experts have also said that the use of Corexit has prolonged by decades the presence of toxic crude oil, because the dispersant sinks the oil beneath the ocean surface, where it cannot be quickly broken down by sun, waves and microbes.

And the head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Ecology Department - Terry Hazen - argues that the use of dispersants can delay recovery of ocean ecosystems by decades:

Hazen has more than 30 years experience studying the effects of oil spills. He says the oil will be damaging enough; toxic dispersants will just make it worse. He points to the 1978 Amoco Cadiz Spill off the coast of Normandy as an example. He says areas where dispersants were used still have not fully recovered, while areas where there was no human intervention are now fine.

As Hazen has noted:

"The untreated coastal areas were fully recovered within five years of the Amoco Cadiz spill," says Hazen. "As for the treated areas, ecological studies show that 30 years later, those areas still have not recovered."

Admittedly, chemicals other than Corexit were used in the Amoco Cadiz spill. But the precautionary tale still holds: chemicals should not be applied to oil spills unless scientists are positive that they will provide a net long-term benefit.

Disturbingly, Corexit is apparently still being sprayed in the Gulf. See this, this and this

But here's what's interesting: For all the hue and cry and rending of garments that's going on among the denizens of Wingnutistan about Barack Obama over things that are demonstrably not true, we have an increasing number of scientists willing to speak out about the still-unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (claims by the Administration notwithstanding), and there's not a peep out of them about the poison being unleashed by Obama's current Head Corporate Boss, BP. Of course to join the outcry would be to acknowledge that there is no "invisible hand" making corporations ultimately do the public good and that the free market doesn't always work for the benefit of all. And we mustn't have anything get in the way of our ideology.

Meanwhile, here in Sanityville, it looks like Mr. Brilliant was right all along: elections are only here to make you THINK you have a choice.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Barack Obama, Democratic sellouts, environmental death watch