So, we've been hearing a lot of chatter on cable TV this week about a Fox News/GOP Tea Party Revolution. Fox News and the right wing fringe of the GOP have obviously gone completely bat bleep crazy over something. They are screaming day in and day about something. I am not sure what it is at this point. I've heard rants like "taxation without representation."
Huh? As I've mentioned before, we had an election recently that did not require lawsuits or recounts. This week President Obama has a 66% approval rating. The Democratic Party is at 51% while the Republican Party has a 26% approval rating. A majority of Independents and some moderate Republicans support President Obama's agenda.
So why is there so noise spewing from the right? Is this tea party thing merely a childish tantrum thrown by a bunch of sore losers and clowns?
Let's explore a few events of this past week to try to find an answer.
Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is also one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
As we all know, this week is the last of the G.W. Bush Administration. Given a national Democratic landslide election and George W. Bush's recent approval rating, there is little doubt that there is more than a tad of dancing taking place in a plethora of streets throughout the U.S. and the world.
For much of their eight year term in office, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have remained tightly entrenched behind iron gates. They avoided the press and media as much as possible. They steered clear of the public and chose to helicopter in and out of their homes and offices whenever feasible. And yet for the past two weeks both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been parading around on the Sunday morning talk and political news circuits. In their final days in office both men desperately tried their darnedest to re-write history. I imagine at this time, after Bush's farewell address, both men are securely ensconced back in their delusional bubbles in undisclosed locations.
With regard to Presidential exit interviews, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is one of many who offered commentary on Bush's farewell address.
"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have tarnished our government's moral standing in the world," McClellan said. "If you look at the speech it was really a feel-good farewell speech. It was designed one final chance to burnish his legacy by highlighting his humanity, showing his humanity, his compassion, his inner decency and good intentions."
But "there are really two problems they don't seem to get," Bush's ex-press secretary remarked. "First of all, the public trust. The president long ago sadly lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. Unless he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people they are not tuning in."
For the last few weeks we have been listening to wall-to-wall coverage 24/7 about the flamboyant governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, and pay-to-play politics. As we all know by now the Illinois governor is charged with criminal conspiracy for attempting to sell President Elect Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat. Rod Blagojevich is clearly another crooked and arrogant politician who thinks he is above the law. But at least this one found himself impeached by the Illinois House.
It is nice to know some states have lawmakers who have an ethical spine where such blatant corruption and beyond the pale pay-to-play politics are concerned. Too bad Texas is sorely lacking in this area. But one has to remember the Party that is running the state at this time, although not all Democratic politicians would receive A's in ethics and integrity departments either.
When the Blagojevich scandal broke, several of the cable TV talking heads and pundits appeared especially outraged by pay-to-play politics and so I promptly sent off an email to MSNBC and CNN and suggested that if they are so livid about pay-to-play, they ought to send their research staff down to Texas to see how it works in a state where purchasing elections and pay-to-play is business du jour. Apparently other folks from around the U.S. contacted the media with the same request. Chris Matthews of Hardball responded with a chart that listed the most offending states. Texas is among them.
As we learn more and more each day about Governor Sarah Palin, more than a few comments have been percolating in the blogosphere about how her style of governing shares much in common with that of George W. Bush. This thought is a darkly disturbing one to those of us who honestly believe W. is quite frankly the worst nightmare to happen to the United States of America and its people in a long time. Certainly, over 70% of Americans believe this to be true.
If Sarah Palin is all that the GOP could come up with as its Vice Presidential candidate one must wonder what these people have in mind for a future United States. Does it intend to completely dismantle civil liberties,constitutional rights and democratic principles altogether? Will it privatize and politicize every governmental agency? Will it sell off our social security funds to Enron Kenny boy types so they can steal and squander it? Will it set up an even more authoritarian kind of presidency in which he or she is accountable to no one?
Sarah Palin isn't who she says she is and most of us very practical, common sense and rationally thinking and (the D.C. punditry's so-called Wal-Mart) Moms know it. Even the deeply religious (though perhaps not the fundamentalist extremist) Moms sense it. Palin is breaking too many rules. She is trashing our collectively perceived code of conduct in the same fashion that W. walks all over the U.S. Constitution and lies about Iraq. The over-the-top attacks and bullying lies are sending off alarm bells. McCain and Palin are beginning to act and sound in an alarming and rather insane fashion.
Why is Palin going this low when she could serve as a feminist role model for women who would like to serve in politics?
For all of her so-called sizzle, Moms like me are beginning to think Sarah Palin's level of arrogance is worse than W.'s. She, like him, insults the American people by lying to us. She and McCain must think we are all stupid.
Who is Sarah Palin, really? For starters it seems that she has a problem with telling the truth. Sound familiar?
Is the shoot out over? Have the assault weapons been locked up? Is it safe to come outside to play?
Wow. After watching Palin's performance the other night in which she went to the mats straightaway without wasting a moment, I have to say she did a damned good job at delivering a speech written by one of Rove's minions. You go girl. You are tough indeed and you did what you were called to do. With Rove's guidance, you are now the future of the Republican Party. What a new and bright future lies ahead for your Party.
In the middle of it all, one of my nieces who is visiting us asked "Why is she so mean?" My niece is a typically apolitical but engaged college student. I replied "Because it is all about
her."
Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
According to a piece written in The Huffington Post U.S. military contractors in Iraq have charged the American taxpayers $85. billion for services rendered.
It should come as no surprise to any informed person that these outsourced services are not any less costly than those that could have been provided by the U.S. military.
Worse, these military contractors are responsible for the accidental deaths and shootings of more than a few of our U.S. military.
Are the hired contractors typically incompetent Republican heckofajob brownies or are they simply outright criminals?
It is hard to tell the difference between ineptitude and crime under W. rule.
One must understand the ideology that drives the Republican Party's quest to wage war and, at the same time, enable contractors who are given a free ride to rob our nation's piggy bank.
The media's self-righteous outrage in covering John Edward's affair is so over the top that one has to wonder why it is protesting so much. Why are the reporters and anchors so personally outraged? If they have a problem with affairs, what about McCain's cruel and calloused ditching of his first wife, who was crippled, for a younger and richer woman? What about that lobbyist lady friend of his that was mentioned in the New York Times? Or who was that Ms. what's her face with Dick Cheney on that infamous hunting trip when he shot one of his friends in the face?
Last night I switched channels from MSNBC's Hardball to CNN's Wolf to Faux's whomever (didn't hang long enough to find out b/c I refuse to have my intelligence insulted by a bunch of water carrying bushie propagandists). It was all the same: John Edwards, John Edwards and then John Edwards. Fuming, I turned off the idiot box and blasted off the following email to Hardball.
I am sure everyone has heard the economic advisor for Senator John McCain and former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm's words of wisdom last week. Apparently Mr. Gramm is impatient with the American people and he graciously volunteered to serve as our personal life coach and economic counselor for the day.
It sure is nice when one of our former U.S. Senators decides to descend from the bubbly stratosphere of wealth where 1% of the nation's people reside. Those of us below should feel blessed when a resident of this realm decides to pay us a social call. And we should feel especially grateful when the bubble dweller decides to give us a little pep talk and reassure us about our financial well-being.
According to former Senator Phil Gramm, the media covers only the negative news about the economy. Gramm insists the economic news is nothing more than fabricated doom and gloom. According to him, the economy is fine, it is humming along splendidly and therefore we should all be very happy. Any pain we think we might experience at the pump or at the checkout lanes of the supermarket does not exist. It is all in our heads. You see we are in the state of a "mental recession" according to the former U.S. Senator. We are becoming a nation of whiners, Gramm admonished.
