CJ's NWI Opinion

05-18 Protect Junior's Birthright

2010-05-18T08:42:00.000-05:00

A far cry indeed from 'socialism'
Among developed nations, America trails the pack in taxation and redistribution of wealth
By Thomas F. Schaller
May 18, 2010

The word "socialism" has been bandied around by all sorts of critics of the current government. Whether emanating from the lips of elite politicians or grass-roots activists, the word stirs passions, even outrage.

I'm not certain how those worried about American "socialism" define the term, but it's a good guess they refer to some if not all of the following concerns: that the U.S. government is too big and becoming bigger; that the government increasingly engages in confiscatory taxation and redistributive spending; and that socialism is in general inimical to the American ideals of hard work and initiative as the keys to success.

Of course, one person's socialism is another's good government, a lesson we learned last summer when a man stood up at a town hall to warn his local congressman to keep his "government hands off my Medicare." Medicare, for the record, is the fastest-growing major federal program, with annual spending exceeding the entire budgets of all but nine countries.

But Medicare can't be the source of socialist fears. If it were, there would have been tea party rallies during the Bush era, when Medicare spending doubled from $224 billion in 2000 to $469 billion by 2008. If it were, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, whose new book is entitled "Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide Into Socialism," wouldn't have opposed Obamacare because of its expense while also complaining, falsely, that the legislation would cut Medicare spending.

So, just how "socialist" is the U.S. government?

The answer is to some degree subjective: Some Americans surely deem any social program or any level of government social spending (that doesn't benefit them personally, that is) as "socialist." What we can measure objectively is just how big and redistributive the U.S. government is compared to other industrialized countries.

Let's start with size. In terms of taxes as a share of gross domestic product, at 28 percent America's government (state and federal) is among the smallest of the 31 first-world nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In fact, only Mexico, Turkey, Japan and South Korea are smaller.

Still, by dint of the size of America's economy, which accounts for more than a quarter of the world's GDP, and thus our huge budget, there must be a lot of redistribution to rob hard-working Peters to pay lazy and shiftless Pauls, right?

Not really. Ranging from zero to one, a statistical measure called the "Gini coefficient" measures the distribution of income in a society: The more evenly income is distributed across all citizens, the closer the coefficient is to zero, and vice versa.

Before government taxes and transfers, America's Gini coefficient is .46 — almost exactly the same as the average for all OECD countries (.45), and identical to that of nations as diverse as Australia, the United Kingdom and Slovakia. Portugal (.54), Italy (.56) and Poland (.57) have the least evenly distributed incomes before taxes and transfers. (As a matter of empirics I use the word "evenly" rather than "fairly," which is a normative distinction for readers to make.)

After taxes and transfers, America's Gini coefficient drops to .38, proving that our government policies are indeed redistributive. But that figure is the highest among all OECD countries, which means American policies have the least redistributive effect of any first-world country on the planet.

But whether we spend on guns or butter, Americans don't make their way by dint of government handouts anyway. They make it by hard work and pluck — or do they?

If economic success were based largely on skill and effort, there would be greater "intergenerational economic mobility," a fancy term used by economists that refers to how much a person's income can be explained by his or her parents' income. In fact, the United States features one of the lowest intergenerational mobility rates in the OECD.

In which countries are personal incomes least dependent upon parental incomes? Hold onto your cups and saucers, tea partiers, because the answer is — wait for it — those darned "socialist" countries like Denmark, Norway and Finland.

All of which helps explains why the United States is joined by Turkey and Mexico as the OECD countries with the highest poverty rates. What else would you expect from a relatively small, mildly redistributive government in a society where "who's your daddy" matters more than it does in most of the rest of the first world?

The socialism Chicken Littles should stop their squawking. In America, socialism isn't even in the neighborhood, much less lurking around the corner.

CJ's Opinion: Apparently, having poverty rates on a par with Turkey and Mexico keeps daddy's money safe for lazy little junior who never did an honest day's work in his pathetic little life. They won't be happy until the rich have it all and the rest of us are living in slums, choking on the toxic sludge pouring out of their factories that employ us peons for slave wages, while junior tools around in the yacht bought with money hidden from the taxman in offshore accounts.

Dear God, please show these poor heathens the immense power of your glory and save us from Socialism! (That's sarcasm: for those Americans who are too stupid to get it).

05-17 LET US PREY

2010-05-17T07:41:00.000-05:00

God Is Covered in Oil
By Steven Weber
May 16, 2010

The oil industries rape the Earth while the citizens, shackled to the planet's life's blood, look on and wonder when She will shrug them off like a dog flinging water off its fur.

And let's face it: reliance on "God" doing the regulating while mankind does his business is now officially a bullshit proposition. God? Just another PR construct allowing rich fellers and the willfully ignorant to do what they please regardless of the consequences.

Because the folks at BP and all the other ancillary entities who pull the strings are the real gods here. And the gods are merciless.

Behold the gods of unregulated industry: they guard the wells, the banks, the battlefields; they guard the media, the farms, the laboratories.

These gods are sick. They have sated themselves on the planet's bounty and their attendant gluttony has created misery. We are being told that there is trouble in the Gulf. But we are not told the real story. Gods don't want the whole story told about anything, lest it become apparent that they aren't gods at all but just dumb, greedy, powerful men.

So as the oil weeps its way into the ocean, starting a chain of death that the stupid god-men dismiss with a smirk, thinking they are immune from the effects of their unregulated ignorance, the rest of the sentient world will have to resign themselves to becoming a race of coal mine canaries, twitching and spasming as the waters become fouled, the food chain ruptures, the life cycle becomes corrupted and the world wide withering begins.

Maybe the bible was a deceptively wry joke, that "God" is really Man, and that "His" creation is really whatever Man creates out of what the resources the Earth has in abundance. And that Armageddon is the war Man has with his world after the generations of misuse and abuse.

It shows you how badly regulation is needed for things which inevitably spin out of control. Things like Man. Too bad God is in the way.

CJ's Opinion: Our Fathers, who art at BP/Goldman Sachs/Washington, D.C., hallowed be thy names, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth but not within a 100-mile radius of your mansions.

05-09 Duhhhhh

2010-05-09T12:53:00.000-05:00

New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country
By Bill Maher
August 7, 2009

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing - in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It's how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, the hate mail all seemed to have a running theme: that I may live in a stupid country, but they lived in the greatest country on earth, and that perhaps I should move to another country, like Somalia. Well, the joke's on them because I happen to have a summer home in Somalia... and no I can't show you an original copy of my birth certificate because Woody Harrelson spilled bong water on it.

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife's name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge."

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It's actually less than 1%. And don't even ask about cabinet members: seven in ten think Napolitano is a kind of three-flavored ice cream. And last election, a full one-third of voters forgot why they were in the booth, handed out their pants, and asked, "Do you have these in a relaxed-fit?"

And I haven't even brought up America's religious beliefs. But here's one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There's a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. "Inside the beltway" thinking may be wrong, but at least it's thinking, which is more than you can say for what's going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that "pure democracy" doesn't work because "there is nothing to check... an obnoxious individual." Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.

Until we admit there are things we don't know, we can't even start asking the questions to find out. Until we admit that America can make a mistake, we can't stop the next one. A smart guy named Chesterton once said: "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying... It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" To which most Americans would respond: "Are you calling my mother a drunk?"

CJ's Opinion: BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Americans are some seriously STOOOOPID people!

05-03 Chronic American Alzheimer's

2010-05-03T11:41:00.000-05:00

Common Theme of Gulf Oil Spill, Wall Street Collapse: Unrestrained Corporate Recklessness
By Robert Creamer
May 2, 2010

The BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the 2008 collapse of Wall Street may not be identical twins, but they are siblings. Both are the children of unrestrained corporate recklessness -- recklessness that was made possible by a fifty-year corporate conservative campaign to prevent government from holding corporations accountable to the public interest.

The recklessness of Wall Street banks cost eight million Americans their jobs, and millions more their pensions. All of those unemployed Americans and under-utilized plants, stores and warehouses cost us trillions of dollars in lost economic output that we will never recover. It cost governments tax dollars that could have been used to educate children, build new roads, find cures for disease. It cost us hundreds of millions in interest to borrow the money we needed to jump-start the economy and provide basic services.

The Goldman Sachs emails published by Senator Levin's Committee on Investigations brought Wall Street recklessness into clear focus. There was nothing there about the consequences of their actions for the society or economy at large -- only how the trader who referred to himself as "Fabulous Fab" could make millions for himself at the expense of anyone who happened to be gullible enough to buy his worthless investments.

The oil company BP -- and the entire global oil industry -- have been no less reckless in their unquenchable thirst for profits. It doesn't take a genius to predict that when you start drilling thousands of wells in mile-deep water in the middle of the economically and ecologically critical Gulf Coast, something might go terribly wrong.

Of course we've seen what might go wrong up close and personal before. The Exxon Valdez disaster resulted in incalculable loss to the environment, billions in loss to fishermen and the Alaska economy, and billions more for a cleanup that lasted over three years.

The Santa Barbara oil spill despoiled miles of beaches, and for a time put the brakes on some forms of reckless oil exploration.

We don't yet know the full consequences of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for the economy or environment -- nor do we know the full range of preparations that BP made in the event of a catastrophe. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Whatever preparations they made were obviously far from adequate to stop what may become a cataclysmic event.

One thing we do know for sure: left to themselves, giant international corporations will always be reckless in their pursuit of more and more profit.

These international corporations have no loyalty whatsoever to our country or its welfare. They are huge, free-floating international organizations dedicated to only one goal: making as much money as possible for themselves. Remember that BP is British Petroleum. When it comes to Wall Street, its own advertisements remind us that "Citi Corp never sleeps" -- it does business in every corner of the globe. The trading group that sank AIG was based in London. And Goldman Sachs makes its billions from deals and trades in every corner of the world. These companies have no loyalty to the people or interests of the United States.

The cultures of these organizations reward short-term profit. They do nothing to punish employees or leaders for global economic or environmental catastrophe.

There is only one brake on this recklessness. That would be us -- in the form of our government.

For the last four decades the Conservative Movement and its corporate backers have promoted the notion that the private sector can and should be left alone to do whatever it wants, since only the private sector (meaning international banks and corporations) can create innovation and economic growth. To facilitate this, conservative leader Grover Norquist says that government should be shrunk so much that it could be "drowned in a bathtub."

After the Great Depression, we created the Security and Exchange Commission to oversee the stock market, the FDIC to guarantee ordinary depositors against bank failures, and passed the Glass-Steagall Act that prevented banks from engaging in reckless speculative activities that would endanger the economy. As a result there was no "credit crisis" in America for over half a century - and also the greatest period of long-term economic growth on record - the period that led to the birth of the American Middle Class. The first major American credit crisis following the Great Depression happened when the Reagan Administration deregulated the Savings and Loan industry.

And then the Big Wall Street Banks, and their conservative and Republican enablers -- convinced Congress to "deregulate" Wall Street and repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in the 1990's and the results are there for everyone to see. Now they are fighting tooth and nail to kill or weaken legislation that would begin, once again to hold Wall Street Banks accountable.

The big oil companies and Republicans have done exactly the same thing when it comes to weakening regulations, allowing oil companies to drill in riskier and riskier environments. Just as importantly, so far they have blocked passage of legislation to develop clean energy that would threaten the profits of Big Oil but would make it unnecessary for our society to risk the Gulf Coast to get our energy from dirty fuels like oil in the first place.

To prevent future economic and environmental disasters, Progressives have to stand up straight and demand strong, forceful action by government to hold big international corporations accountable. Government is not the problem -- in this case it is the solution.

And we have to assert once again that government is not some far off entity that orders us around and intrudes into our lives. As President Obama said last weekend in Ann Arbor -- in a democratic society, the government is us. Or as Congressman Barney Frank puts it: "Government is the name of the things we choose to do together."

We know how to use government to rein in the natural recklessness of huge corporations. Take commercial aviation. In spite of some periodic lapses in government oversight, the generally tough regulation of aviation by the FAA has turned commercial aviation into the safest mode of transportation in human history. It is safer to fly somewhere on an airplane than to take a train, drive, horseback ride, bike or even walk there.

In 2009, there were only three commercial aviation accidents classified as serious by the National Transportation Safety Board over the course of 18 million hours flow. The probability of a passenger being killed on a single flight is approximately eight million-to-one. In other words, if a passenger boarded a flight at random once a day, everyday, statistically it would take over 21,000 years before he or she would be killed.

That record of safety is not because people who go into the airline business are any less interested in making money than people who go into the oil business or Wall Street trading. It is because the public demanded strong government regulation of the safety of commercial aviation. That in turn has created a culture inside aviation companies that makes safety a primary value and actually ostracizes reckless behavior.

Left to its own devices the "invisible hand of the market" will not create that kind of culture. It never has, it never will. That is particularly true where the activities of companies are hidden from view of average citizens and consumers. Even the most sophisticated customers on Wall Street didn't have a clue how to evaluate the risks associated with the collateralized debt obligations being sold by Goldman Sachs. The electricity consumers whose power is made with coal haven't got an inkling about the working conditions of the miners that dig out that coal. And the everyday consumers of gasoline sure don't know what kind of risks BP is taking 5000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico as it drills for oil.

We can't just sit by and allow these huge private actors to threaten the well-being and future of our society just because they want to be free to make as much money as they can.

On last Sunday's "This Week" former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd kept repeating the new Republican mantra: "Washington doesn't work." Now there is the ultimate in Republican chutzpa. The modern Republican Party has done everything it can to prevent "Washington" from working. It diverted hundreds of billions of government revenue into tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. It gutted regulations that held Wall Street and the oil companies accountable. It is blocking clean energy legislation that would free us from the stranglehold of Big Oil. It tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent passage of desperately-needed health care reform that would for the first time hold the private insurance companies accountable - companies that have driven American health care costs to the point where they are 50% higher than any other nation.

Ignoring the fact that Republicans have fought on behalf of big mine owners for years to weaken mine safety oversight, Dowd actually had the gall to say that the mine disaster in West Virginia was an example of how "Washington doesn't work."

He correctly pointed out that the draconian Arizona anti-immigrant "papers please" law was a response to the failure of Washington to take action to fix the broken immigration system. But he conveniently forgot that it is the Republicans who refuse to allow action to go forward to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

And, of course, he actually argued that the Gulf oil spill was yet another indication that "Washington doesn't work." This, from the party of the now-silent cries of "drill, baby, drill."

The Republicans and their corporate patrons will do everything in their power to get America to forget the iconic symbols of their failures. They will try to convince us that Barack Obama and the Democrats are somehow responsible for the collapse of Wall Street and the Great Recession - even though it all happened on the Republican watch and because of the failure of their policies and the bankruptcy of their economic philosophy.

But Dowd's audacity needs to remind progressive Democrats that people across America want action. They want Washington to work. And to make Washington work, we need to demand that Congress reassert the power of government to hold mine owners, Wall Street banks, Big Oil -- and all of the most powerful international corporations - accountable to the interests of everyday Americans.

CJ's Opinion: I swear I didn't read this article until several hours after posting my previous blog entry, but the author very clearly agrees with my assessment (minus the 'stupid Americans' bit, of course)…

One thing we do know for sure: left to themselves, giant international corporations will always be reckless in their pursuit of more and more profit.

These international corporations have no loyalty whatsoever to our country or its welfare. They are huge, free-floating international organizations dedicated to only one goal: making as much money as possible for themselves. Remember that BP is British Petroleum. When it comes to Wall Street, its own advertisements remind us that "Citi Corp never sleeps" -- it does business in every corner of the globe. The trading group that sank AIG was based in London. And Goldman Sachs makes its billions from deals and trades in every corner of the world. These companies have no loyalty to the people or interests of the United States.

The cultures of these organizations reward short-term profit. They do nothing to punish employees or leaders for global economic or environmental catastrophe.

There is only one brake on this recklessness. That would be us -- in the form of our government.

I sincerely doubt that this is possible, but the unspoken message in virtually all of my opinions is this…

To prevent future economic and environmental disasters, Progressives have to stand up straight and demand strong, forceful action by government to hold big international corporations accountable. Government is not the problem -- in this case it is the solution.

But what's the point? Sadly, it'll never happen. Republicans are poised to take back the reins of government in November. It seems we stupid Americans have an extremely short attention span and can't even remember the devastating consequences of having Republicans running the show only a few short months ago. We are seriously fucked!

05-03 Corporate Success Story

2010-05-03T06:22:00.000-05:00

Drilling, Disaster, Denial
By Paul Krugman
May 2, 2010

It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn’t have drilled the Deepwater Horizon well in the first place. Yet for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a strangely old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the events that led to the first Earth Day, four decades ago.

And maybe, just maybe, the disaster will help reverse environmentalism’s long political slide — a slide largely caused by our very success in alleviating highly visible pollution. If so, there may be a small silver lining to a very dark cloud.

Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.

It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action. The Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and America began making headway against its most visible environmental problems. Air quality improved: smog alerts in Los Angeles, which used to have more than 100 a year, have become rare. Rivers stopped burning, and some became swimmable again. And Lake Erie has come back to life, in part thanks to a ban on laundry detergents containing phosphates.

Yet there was a downside to this success story.

For one thing, as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”

This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.

Nor was a loss of public interest the only negative consequence of the decline in visible pollution. As the photogenic crises of the 1960s and 1970s faded from memory, conservatives began pushing back against environmental regulation.

Much of the pushback took the form of demands that environmental restrictions be weakened. But there was also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans. (I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that caricature.)

And let’s admit it: by and large, the anti-environmentalists have been winning the argument, at least as far as public opinion is concerned.

Then came the gulf disaster. Suddenly, environmental destruction was photogenic again.

For the most part, anti-environmentalists have been silent about the catastrophe. True, Mr. Limbaugh — arguably the Republican Party’s de facto leader — promptly suggested that environmentalists might have blown up the rig to head off further offshore drilling. But that remark probably reflected desperation: Mr. Limbaugh knows that his narrative has just taken a big hit.

For the gulf blowout is a pointed reminder that the environment won’t take care of itself, that unless carefully watched and regulated, modern technology and industry can all too easily inflict horrific damage on the planet.

Will America take heed? It depends a lot on leadership. In particular, President Obama needs to seize the moment; he needs to take on the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, telling America that courting irreversible environmental disaster for the sake of a few barrels of oil, an amount that will hardly affect our dependence on imports, is a terrible bargain.

It’s true that Mr. Obama isn’t as well positioned to make this a teachable moment as he should be: just a month ago he announced a plan to open much of the Atlantic coast to oil exploration, a move that shocked many of his supporters and makes it hard for him to claim the moral high ground now.

But he needs to get beyond that. The catastrophe in the gulf offers an opportunity, a chance to recapture some of the spirit of the original Earth Day. And if that happens, some good may yet come of this ecological nightmare.

CJ's Opinion: Far too many people falsely believe that businesses are highly benevolent and deeply concerned with protecting Americas natural resources; the ultimate American manifestation of the greatest socioeconomic system in the world. In other words, Americans are incredibly naïve.

The only thing businesses care about is money: doing everything within their considerable power to make more of it at a faster rate than ever before, and damn the consequences. They'll gladly spend millions to lobby (bribe) politicians and to pay for public relations ad campaigns (propaganda) touting their "deep commitment to protecting the environment," when in actuality they are doing no such thing at all (save for a meager showing that produces great publicity but has little effect).

And gullible Americans see their patriotic and moving TV commercials and fall for their bullshit stories every single time. Because you are stupid.

So now the entire Gulf of Mexico has been devastated by their toxic sludge, the regional and national economies are taking yet another big hit, the sensitive ecosystem has been damaged beyond repair, and your own families are being poisoned by the toxins that will eventually spread far beyond the immediate area of the spill. And, because of your own stupidity, you deserve exactly what you get.

Will we learn anything from this? Will politicians enforce stricter standards and penalties? Will businesses suddenly see the error of their ways and clean up their mess? Hell no! Why should they?! You're too stupid to matter to them. Duh!

04-28 The Radical Right

2010-04-28T10:44:00.000-05:00

Oklahoma's Draconian Anti-Choice Law and the Radicalization of America Under Obama
By Peter Daou
April 28, 2010

And in the end, what's missing from the re-ascendant radical right is precisely logical, ethical and intellectual consistency: railing against separation of church and state while praising the Founders; happily spending billions for our troops to die in a war launched under false pretenses while vehemently objecting to health coverage for our neighbors; going on a rampage against liberalism, equating it with socialism, while having no conception of what either term actually means.

The brief moment in late 2008 when 'hope' was more than just a slogan, when progressives believed that an irrefutable case could and would be made for progressive principles, when it appeared rationality would become a guiding force in American politics, is long gone. In its place we have an increasingly radicalized public and the imposition of rules and regulations that would do the 18th century proud.

This is why the progressive cause never ends.

Full article here.

CJ's Opinion: Hear, hear!

04-26 Workers Have No Value in America

2010-04-26T21:27:00.001-05:00

Mourn the dead; fight for the living
Too many workers die on the job; they need more protection
By Richard Trumka
April 26, 2010

Here's a chilling thought: You can get more jail time for harassing a burro on federal land than for killing a worker.

Tragic, but true. Willful violation of workplace safety laws that kills a worker carries a maximum jail term of six months for a first offender. It's a year for burro harassment.

Penalties for employers who knowingly put workers' lives in danger are so weak and so ripe for manipulation, they hardly matter.

Since the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed in 1970, more than 360,000 workers have died on the job but only 79 cases have been prosecuted, with defendants serving a total of 89 months in jail.

Civil penalties are just as toothless. After legal wrangling and settlements, the average penalty paid by an employer for violations involving a worker's death is a pitiful $5,000.

Life shouldn't be this cheap.

Every year, unions and workplace health and safety advocates around the world mark April 28 as Workers Memorial Day -- a time, to quote Mother Jones, to "mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

The heartbreaking and probably preventable deaths of 29 coal miners this month at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia temporarily focused national attention on the negligence of Massey Energy Co. and the inadequacies in our health and safety laws. It was the deadliest coal mine disaster in 40 years, but it was not an isolated event or some rare fluke.

An explosion at the Tesoro Refinery in Anacortes, Wash., three days earlier killed six workers. In February, six workers were killed in an explosion at the Kleen Energy Plant under construction in Middletown, Conn. More than 5,200 workers were killed on the job in 2008 (the most recent data available). That's 14 a day.

Too many employers put profits before safety, pushing for production at any cost. That certainly seems to be the case at Massey, with CEO Don Blankenship's shameful record of demanding that miners "run coal" regardless of the consequences, drawn-out litigation to delay stronger enforcement and the racking up of 639 violations at Upper Big Branch since the start of 2009.

There's got to be justice for those 29 miners, their families, their colleagues and their close-knit community. Legal authorities, federal and state mine-safety agencies and congressional committees are investigating. Personally, I'd like to see Mr. Blankenship sent to jail. Clearly we have to stop allowing the gamesmanship that lets people like him postpone tough enforcement action until an inevitable catastrophe occurs.

But we'll do a disservice to those unnecessarily lost miners and thousands of others if we don't look more broadly at what must happen to make sure workers get home alive at the end of their shifts.

Decades of struggle by workers and their unions have improved workplace safety significantly, but eight years of neglect, inaction and outright hostility by the Bush administration eroded our protections. Focus shifted from protecting workers to protecting employers, claiming corporations could police themselves and actually allowing crackdowns on workers who had the nerve to get hurt on the job.

OSHA is 40 years old now. It's been tweaked a bit over time, but it's due for a real update.

OSHA does not cover millions of public-sector workers. Its penalties are so weak they don't deter recklessness. It doesn't shield workers from retaliation for reporting injuries. And with the current work force of 885 federal safety inspectors, the agency can inspect workplaces on average only once every 137 years. The Mine Safety and Health Act is a much stronger law that provides for regular inspections in all mines, but it still has loopholes that operators exploit to avoid tougher sanctions.

The Protecting America's Workers Act (H.R. 2067, S. 1580) would extend OSHA coverage to workers who lack legal protection, increase civil and criminal penalties, strengthen anti-discrimination protections and expand worker, union and victims' rights. The S-MINER Act introduced in the last Congress would stiffen enforcement of the mine-safety law. And labor law reform enabling more workers to choose a union voice on the job for safety would add protections every working woman and man deserves.

On this Workers Memorial Day, with loss of life at Upper Big Branch mine still fresh on our minds, the least we can do to honor fallen workers is to fight to pass these laws. We must never forget that a good job must be a safe job first and foremost.

CJ's Opinion: According to OSHA, there were 5,214 workplace fatalities in 2008. Five Thousand Two Hundred and Fourteen Dead American Workers. 14 workers are killed on the job every single day. The fatalities aren't evenly distributed among the 50 states but, if they were, it would average over 100 people per state per year. These are our neighbors, and sometimes our own family members, that are dying left and right so that we all can enjoy the products they sacrificed their lives to produce.

The American people and their government must hold employers accountable, or the workplace killing will never stop. If 5,214 policemen or firemen were killed on the job the entire nation would be up in arms; we'd be ready to wage war or spend any amount of money to protect them. But, since it's only working men and women, nobody gives a flying fuck!

Americans are rotten, self-centered pigs that care only about themselves, and nothing or no one else matters. I hope the next person to die is someone you love - that would be justice served!

04-25 It's a Dirty Business

2010-04-25T11:07:00.004-05:00

Tea Party With a Difference
By Thomas L. Friedman
April 24, 2010

I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years. Never mind. I’m sure like all such protest movements the Tea Partiers will get their 10 to 20 percent of the vote. But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more than just entertainment for Fox News, I have a suggestion:

Become the Green Tea Party.

I’d be happy to design the T-shirt logo and write the manifesto. The logo is easy. It would show young Americans throwing barrels of oil imported from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia into Boston Harbor.

The manifesto is easy, too: “We, the Green Tea Party, believe that the most effective way to advance America’s national security and economic vitality would be to impose a $10 “Patriot Fee” on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”

America now imports about 11 million barrels a day, about 57 percent of our total oil needs — mostly from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. As T. Boone Pickens told Congress the other day: “In January 2010, our trade deficit for the month was $37.3 billion — $27.5 billion of that was money we sent overseas to import oil.”

If we put a Patriot Fee on all of those imported barrels, we would use less, cease enriching bad regimes, strengthen our own dollar, make the air cleaner and the climate more stable, foster the exploitation of domestic and renewable energy sources, promote electric vehicles, help bring down the global price of oil (which hurts Iran and helps poor Africa), and we could use the revenue to shrink the deficit. It’s win, win, win, win, win, win ...

Full story here.

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Oil Rig, Deepwater Horizon, Leaking Into Gulf Of Mexico
By Cain Burdeau
April 24, 2010

NEW ORLEANS — The Coast Guard discovered Saturday that oil is leaking from the damaged well that fed a massive rig that exploded this week off Louisiana's coast, while bad weather halted efforts to clean up the mess that threatens the area's fragile marine ecosystem.

For days, the Coast Guard has said no oil appeared to be escaping from the well head on the ocean floor. Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the leak was a new discovery but could have begun when the rig sank on Thursday, two days after the initial explosion.

"We thought what we were dealing with as of yesterday was a surface residual (oil) from the mobile offshore drilling unit," Landry said. "In addition to that is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday ... This is a very serious spill, absolutely."

Coast Guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels – or 42,000 gallons – of oil is leaking each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site. The rainbow-colored sheen of oil stretched 20 miles by 20 miles on Saturday – about 25 times larger than it appeared to be a day earlier, Landry said.

Full story here.

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The Dirty Secrets Of Coal (Photo Journal)
By Gazelle Emami
April 25, 2010

Coal is a dirty and dangerous business. It produces more than half of the energy in the U.S. because it is a cheap resource, but it comes at a high human and environmental cost. The coal industry is the single largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions -- and that's just the beginning. We're taking a look at some of the dirtiest secrets the coal industry doesn't want you to know.

Photojournal here.

CJ's Opinion: Sadly, most Americans don't have the requisite intelligence to understand our energy situation. They believe that unfettered access to foreign and domestic oil and coal will make their pathetic little lives better somehow. They either don't understand or don't care that we are pouring barrels of American prosperity into the hands of foreign oil suppliers, or that we are poisoning and killing our own people and planet for the sake of cheap electricity.

Oh fucking well - Americans will get what they want - and the morons deserve what they'll get.

04-23 Tea Party Turncoats

2010-04-23T08:52:00.000-05:00

Where Are the Tea Party Protests About Wall Street?
By Cenk Uygur
April 23, 2010

We're down to the wire here on financial reform. I can't think of a better time to put pressure on Wall Street and Washington to make sure there is adequate regulation to ensure that we never have another bailout. The AFL-CIO is about to have a protest at Wall Street on April 29th. Great, that makes sense. I'm sure the right-wing groups who are also upset about the bailouts will join them.

If you remember, the Tea Parties were originally formed to protest the bailouts. They were so mad at the Wall Street bankers who destroyed the economy and then took our hard earned money for their efforts.

So, they will take this opportunity, of course, to launch their own protest of Wall Street. They will protest the TARP money, the easy credit, the lack of regulation, the wild risk taking and the excessive bonuses paid with taxpayer money. They're really going to take the fight to them.

Just kidding. They're not going to do anything. They're going to sit out this fight on financial reform and put absolutely no pressure on Wall Street at all. Because they are tools easily manipulated by right-wing organizations funded by corporate America.

I really feel sorry for them. They're dupes. They think they are so fiercely independent when in fact they are the most easily manipulated people in the country. All that anger toward the power establishment and what happened? They were used by that same establishment to fight against health care reform and to try to protect the health insurance companies. Suckers.

Now, when it's time to fight the financial companies, where are they? Nowhere to be found. Why? Because FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity didn't organize any bus rides to Wall Street. They didn't manufacture the outrage they did in protecting the health care companies. They used the Tea Party protestors for their own purposes and then left them on the side of the road, only to be picked up again when they need to protect another company or industry.

I issued a challenge back in January to the Tea Party organizers to rally against Wall Street or even against the Obama administration (Tim Geithner in particular) for being too soft on them. And what's happened since then? Nada. Zilch. Zippo.

So, I was proven right -- they're never, ever going to protest Wall Street because they are ignorant dupes being led by the nose by their corporate overlords. And they think they're so tough and independent-minded. What a farce. The whole movement is a sad joke being played on its own members.

Full story here.

CJ's Opinion: Apparently, being Taxed Enough Already (T.E.A.) only applies to healthcare and our social safety network and not to fat-cat Wall Street banker types. Just in case anyone still had any illusions that the Tea Party was anything more that a bunch of loud-mouthed, racist, assholes hell-bent on destroying the foundation of America's social safety system. Morons who protest against programs that help ordinary Americans while turning a blind eye to the corporate thieves who strip trillions out of the American economy with impunity.

Turncoat: A person who shifts allegiance from one loyalty or ideal to another, betraying or deserting an original cause by switching to the opposing side or party. In political and social history, this is distinct from being a traitor, as the switch mostly takes place under the following circumstances:

In groups, often driven by one or more leaders.
When the former cause driving and benefitting the person becomes inviable or too fraught with danger.

T.E.A.: Turncoat Extremist Assholes

04-22 Bend Over and Take It

2010-04-22T19:40:00.000-05:00

American Kleptocracy: How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft
By William J. Astore - Retired lieutenant colonel (USAF)
April 22, 2010

Kleptocracy -- now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It’s a word, in fact, that’s usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin America, or the nether regions of Asia. Such governments are typically led by autocratic strong men who shower themselves and their cronies with all the fruits of extracted wealth, whether stolen from the people or squeezed from their country’s natural resources. It’s not a word you’re likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by more-or-less transparent principles and processes.

In fact, when Americans today wish to critique or condemn their government, the typical epithets used are “socialism” or “fascism.” When my conservative friends are upset, they send me emails with links to material about “ObamaCare” and the like. These generally warn of a future socialist takeover of the private realm by an intrusive, power-hungry government. When my progressive friends are upset, they send me emails with links pointing to an incipient fascist takeover of our public and private realms, led by that same intrusive, power-hungry government (and, I admit it, I’m hardly innocent when it comes to such “what if” scenarios).

What if, however, instead of looking at where our government might be headed, we took a closer look at where we are -- at the power-brokers who run or influence our government, at those who are profiting and prospering from it? These are, after all, the “winners” in our American world in terms of the power they wield and the wealth they acquire. And shouldn’t we be looking as well at those Americans who are losing -- their jobs, their money, their homes, their healthcare, their access to a better way of life -- and asking why?

If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of “losers” and the far shinier, spiffier world of “winners,” we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now. We’d notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance with, and passing on remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of “the people.” We’d see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. We would suddenly see an almost magical disappearing act being performed, largely without comment, right before our eyes.

Of Red Herrings and Missing Pallets of Money

Think of socialism and fascism as the red herrings of this moment or, if you’re an old time movie fan, as Hitchcockian MacGuffins -- in other words, riveting distractions. Conservatives and tea partiers fear invasive government regulation and excessive taxation, while railing against government takeovers -- even as corporate lobbyists write our public healthcare bills to favor private interests. Similarly, progressives rail against an emergent proto-fascist corps of private guns-for-hire, warrantless wiretapping, and the potential government-approved assassination of U.S. citizens, all sanctioned by a perpetual, and apparently open-ended, state of war.

Yet, if this is socialism, why are private health insurers the government’s go-to guys for healthcare coverage? If this is fascism, why haven’t the secret police rounded up tea partiers and progressive critics as well and sent them to the lager or the gulag?

Consider this: America is not now, nor has it often been, a hotbed of political radicalism. We have no substantial socialist or workers’ party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the corporate-friendly “Democrat” party here.) We have no substantial fascist party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the cartoonish “tea partiers” here; these predominantly white, graying, and fairly affluent Americans seem most worried that the jackbooted thugs will be coming for them.)

What drives America today is, in fact, business -- just as was true in the days of Calvin Coolidge. But it’s not the fair-minded “free enterprise” system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines for American history textbooks; rather, it’s a rigged system of crony capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy.

Recall, if you care to, those pallets stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in excess of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full, thanks to them.

If you want to know the true state of our government and where it’s heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant: our kleptocratic Houdinis are hard at work, seeking to make yet more money vanish from your pockets -- and reappear in theirs.

From Each According to His Gullibility -- To Each According to His Greed

Never has the old adage my father used to repeat to me -- “the rich get richer and the poor poorer” -- seemed fresher or truer. If you want confirmation of just where we are today, for instance, consider this passage from a recent piece by Tony Judt:

In 2005, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people.

Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly kleptocratic system. War profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt support for our heroic warfighters) is another. Meanwhile, retired senior military officers typically line up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling their “expertise” in return for impressive corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure pensions. Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12 million last year without putting the slightest dent in her populist bona fides.

Based on such stories, now legion, perhaps we should rewrite George Orwell’s famous tagline from Animal Farm as: All animals are equal, but a few are so much more equal than others.

And who are those “more equal” citizens? Certainly, major corporations, which now enjoy a kind of political citizenship and the largesse of a federal government eager to rescue them from their financial mistakes, especially when they’re judged “too big to fail.” In raiding the U.S. Treasury, big banks and investment firms, shamelessly ready to jack up executive pay and bonuses even after accepting billions in taxpayer-funded bailouts, arguably outgun militarized multinationals in the conquest of the public realm and the extraction of our wealth for their benefit.

Such kleptocratic outfits are, of course, abetted by thousands of lobbyists and by politicians who thrive off corporate campaign contributions. Indeed, many of our more prominent public servants have proved expert at spinning through the revolving door into the private sector. Even ex-politicians who prefer to be seen as sympathetic to the little guy like former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt eagerly cash in.

I’m Shocked, Shocked, to Find Profiteering Going on Here

An old Roman maxim enjoins us to “let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Within our kleptocracy, the prevailing attitude is an insouciant “We’ll get ours, though the heavens fall.” This mindset marks the decline of our polity. A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what.

Is it any surprise then that, in seeking to export our form of government to Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve produced not two model democracies, but two emerging kleptocracies, fueled respectively by oil and opium?

When we confront corruption in Iraq or Afghanistan, are we not like the police chief in the classic movie Casablanca who is shocked, shocked to find gambling going on at Rick’s Café, even as he accepts his winnings?

Why then do we bother to feign shock when Iraqi and Afghan elites, a tiny minority, seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority?

Shouldn’t we be flattered? Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. Isn’t it?

CJ's Opinion: I'm shocked, shocked to learn American is being fleeced by the corporate elite! Now, what are we going to do about it? Answer: not a god damned thing! The wealthy corporations and banks own America lock, stock and barrel, and they are not going to give up their golden goose.

We are fucked because the vast majority of Americans are too stupid to understand what is being done to them by the kleptocrats, and the ones who do understand are either too impotent or too cowardly to make a difference. So, we can expect to keep taking it up the ass in perpetuity.

04-19 Hell Theory

2010-04-19T01:00:00.001-05:00

The following is an actual question given on a University of Liverpool chemistry final exam.

The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues via the Internet, which is why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law that gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that, if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell. Because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay constant, the volume of Hell must expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Sandra during my freshman year, that “it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is endothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is extinct…leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being – which explains why, last night, Sandra kept shouting “Oh my God.”

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY “A”.

CJ's Opinion: Hell is a nonexistent place dreamed up by ignorant religious fanatics having a sick and twisted view of the human condition and a diminished grasp of reality. But it's still a funny story. :-)

04-18 Demise of the Tea Party Republicans

2010-04-18T11:09:00.000-05:00

The Republicans' faulty foundation
Once again, the GOP opts for deceit as a short-term political tactic while praying that a cracked base doesn't crumble.
By Robert Shrum
April 15, 2010

Months of death panel promoting, senior citizen deceiving, and abortion mongering have left Republicans immune to facts. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has donned his Frank Luntz mask (maybe McConnell could borrow the pollster’s toupee too), lifting wholesale Luntz’s language designed to mislead the public about financial reform. Playing dummy to Luntz’s ventriloquist, McConnell now shamelessly characterizes the bill that would avert future bailouts on Wall Street as a license for endless bailouts on Wall Street.

This latest Republican exercise in duplicity is easily explained: The GOP can’t openly advocate the policies they believe in—because those policies led to the economic collapse of 2008. Meantime, GOP leaders look at the financial industry and see sacks of campaign cash. It’s no coincidence that last week two dozen Wall Street titans met with McConnell and Republican Senate Campaign Committee Chairman John Cornyn. No one was shy about the quid pro quo, according to Fox News (which helpfully repeated the Luntz propaganda). McConnell and House GOP leader John Boehner offered a pledge that revealed the reality: They would take on, and if they could, take out the government authority to determine when banks should be left to fail. And they said yes, they’d be back—to collect money for Republican candidates.

It’s a naked manifestation of the Republicans as the party of America’s wealthiest special interests. As the process moves ahead, President Obama and the Democrats can say exactly that and hold the political high ground—as they too seldom did during the health debate. But first, and to the consternation of many in their own ranks, Democratic leaders will attempt to reach across the aisle.

This makes sense. There are Wall Street institutions ready to cooperate, to give some ground just as the pharmaceutical industry did to the tune of more than $120 billion on health-care reform. And not every Republican will follow McConnell off the cliff. Tennessee Republican Bob Corker said he hadn’t heard McConnell’s acid comments. So did his colleagues from Maine, the self-professed moderates Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Sen. Scott Brown, the fading hero of the tea parties, says he’s not willing to commit to filibustering financial reform, or even voting against it; he’s clearly running for re-election in Massachusetts in 2012, not for a spot on a losing Republican national ticket.

So Wall Street reform will pass—or GOP hard-liners will pass the populist baton to Obama and the Democrats.

Either way, the day of reckoning for the Party of “No” is coming. The economy is improving. Democrats, who’ve been in the valley, have inched up to a midterm lead in at least one poll, CNN’s. The Republicans who rooted for Obama’s failure—and the economy’s—will only drive themselves deeper into a political cul-de-sac by standing against Wall Street reform.

In 2010, they’ll gain far fewer seats than the latter-day Gingrichites covet. And by 2012, as prosperity brings more Americans to Obama’s side, they’ll find their cul-de-sac is populated by a dwindling band of tea partiers. The prevailing politics of ignorance, fit for this season of discontent, is a tactic of convenience, not a sustaining strategy. The Republicans may have the benefit of coaxial cable to spread contrived calumnies. But in the end, you can’t Luntz reality. The Republican core, the Tea Party that the GOP has embraced, is no foundation for a political comeback.

New polling data this week confirm the true character of this phony populist movement. According to the CBS News/New York Times survey, Tea Party members are almost 50 percent more likely than Americans as a whole to have incomes over $100,000. It turns out that they’re not distressed; they are self-pitying and self-interested. They want their Social Security—and smaller government for everyone else. They are so out of step that 57 percent of them approve of the job performance of George W. Bush—who proliferated the deficits they claim to detest. They give President Obama a net favorability rating of Minus 77 while in the nation at large his rating is Plus 10.

Tea partiers are out of step in another, more shameful way. They are more than twice as likely to believe the president favors blacks over whites, and a majority believes that too much has been made of the problems facing blacks. Many tea partiers turn out to be self-serving bigots. This tells us what they mean when they say they want their country back.

Tea partiers will hasten the demographic disaster facing Republicans in an increasingly diverse America. But Republicans appear determined to accelerate their march of folly by weakening or defeating Wall Street reform. I’m confident the angry, irrational base that claims to be anti-bailout and anti–Wall Street will cheer them on as they do it. But for most Americans, the language of Luntz can’t square the circle; it’s too transparently deceitful, too contrived, too false. In the end, in the economy and even in politics, as Ronald Reagan used to say: “Facts are stubborn things.”

CJ's Opinion: The day of reckoning for the Party of “No” is coming - and not a moment too soon!

04-16 Arrogant Americans Inferior to Swedes

2010-04-16T10:45:00.002-05:00

Viewpoints: Europe tax model delivers much more
By Steven Hill
April 15, 2010

Most Americans seem to regard April 15 – the day income tax returns are due to the Internal Revenue Service – as a recurring tragedy akin to a biblical plague. Particularly this year, with U.S. government deficits soaring, everyone from the tea baggers to Fox News and Senate Republicans are sounding the alarm about a return to "big government."

Ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani even stated recently that President Barack Obama was moving us toward – gasp – European socialism.

Europe frequently plays the punching bag role during these moments because there is a perception that the poor Europeans are overtaxed serfs. But a closer look reveals that this is a myth that prevents Americans from understanding the vast shortcomings of our own system.

A few years ago, an American acquaintance of mine who lives in Sweden told me that, quite by chance, he and his Swedish wife were in New York City and ended up sharing a limousine to the theater district with a southern senator and his wife. This senator, a conservative, anti-tax Democrat, asked my acquaintance about Sweden and swaggeringly commented about "all those taxes the Swedes pay."

To which this American replied, "The problem with Americans and their taxes is that we get nothing for them." He then told the senator about the comprehensive services and benefits that Swedes receive.

"If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot," he told the senator. The rest of the ride to the theater district was unsurprisingly quiet.

The fact is, in return for their taxes, Europeans are receiving a generous support system for families and individuals for which Americans must pay exorbitantly, out-of-pocket, if we are to receive it at all. That includes quality health care for every single person, the average cost of which is about half of what Americans pay, even as various studies show that Europeans achieve healthier results.

That's not all. In return for their taxes, Europeans also receive affordable child care, a decent retirement pension, free or inexpensive university education, job retraining, paid sick leave, paid parental leave, ample vacations, affordable housing, senior care, efficient mass transportation and more.

To get the same level of benefits as Europeans, most Americans fork out a ton of money in out-of-pocket payments, in addition to taxes.

While 47 million Americans don't have any health insurance, many who do are paying escalating premiums and deductibles. Indeed, Anthem Blue Cross announced that its premiums will increase by up to 40 percent.

But all Europeans receive health care in return for a modest amount deducted from their paychecks.

Friends have told me they are saving nearly $100,000 for their children's college education, and most young Americans graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. But European children attend for free, or nearly so (depending on the country).

Child care in the United States costs more than $12,000 annually for a family with two children. In Europe it costs about one-sixth that amount – and the quality is far superior.

Millions of Americans are stuffing as much as possible into their IRAs and 401(k)s because Social Security provides only about half the retirement income needed. The more generous European retirement system provides 75 percent to 85 percent of retirement income, depending on the country. Either way, you pay.

Americans' private spending on old-age care is nearly three times higher per capita than in Europe because Americans must self-finance a significant share of their own senior care. Americans also tend to pay more in local and state taxes, as well as property taxes. Americans also pay hidden taxes, such as $300 billion annually in federal tax breaks to businesses that provide health benefits to their employees.

When you sum up the total balance sheet, it turns out we Americans pay out just as much as Europeans – but receive a lot less for our money.

Unfortunately, these sorts of complexities are not calculated into simplistic analyses like Forbes' annual Tax Misery Index, a "study" that shows European nations as the most miserable and the low-tax United States as happy as a clam – right next to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

In this economically competitive age, these kinds of services increasingly are necessary to ensure healthy, happy and productive families and workers. Europeans have these supports, but most Americans do not – unless you pay a ton out-of-pocket.

Or unless you are a member of Congress, which of course provides European-level support for members and their families.

That's something to keep in mind on April 15. Happy Tax Day.

CJ's Opinion: Arrogant Americans have this bizarre superiority complex and think we're better than others, while the truth of the matter is that we are inferior to most other modern countries. This is why wealthy Republicans do everything they can to weaken the American public education system: an educated populace wouldn't stand for this bullshit American system that provides only for the wealthy elite.

04-16 Americans Are Not Stupid

2010-04-16T02:30:00.001-05:00

CJ's Opinion: Why am I not surprised by this. No news here - just your typical, everyday, ordinary Americans. This is who we are - STOOOOPID.

04-15 Awwwww!

2010-04-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

Got something to say but you want to be a dick about it? Awwwww! Too bad! FOAD.

04-14 America: Home of the Brave (NOT)

2010-04-14T08:45:00.000-05:00

When the Army Uses "Enhanced Interrogation" on an American Soldier
By Joshua Kors
April 14, 2010

I had been covering veterans' issues for several years and thought I'd developed a thick skin. But the pain on the other end of the telephone line was difficult to stomach. Sergeant Chuck Luther, now back from Iraq, was describing his journey to hell and back. The worst part, he said, wasn't battling insurgents or even the mortar blast that tossed him to the ground and slammed his head against the concrete — it was the way he was treated by the U.S. Army when he went to the aid station and sought medical help.

In gruesome detail, Luther described what happened to him at Camp Taji's aid station. He thought he would receive medical care. Instead he was confined to an isolation chamber and held there for over a month, under enforced sleep deprivation, until he agreed to sign papers saying that he was ill before coming to Iraq and thus not eligible for disability and medical benefits. "They wanted me to say I had a 'personality disorder,'" Luther told me.

Luther's call did not come out of the blue. For two years I had been investigating this personality disorder scandal: how military doctors were purposely misdiagnosing soldiers, wounded in combat, as having this pre-existing mental illness. As in the civilian world, where people can be locked out of the insurance system if they have a pre-existing condition, soldiers whose wounds can be attributed to a pre-existing illness can be denied disability benefits and long-term medical care.

My reporting began with the case of Specialist Jon Town, who was wounded in Iraq, won a Purple Heart and was then denied disability and medical benefits. Town's doctor had concluded that his headaches and hearing loss were not caused by the 107-millimeter rocket that knocked him unconscious but by a pre-existing personality disorder.

The spotlight on Town prompted military doctors to step forward and talk about being pressured by their superiors to purposely misdiagnose wounded soldiers. One doctor spoke of a soldier who returned from Iraq with a massive chunk missing from his right leg. The doctor quit after he was pressured to diagnose that soldier as having personality disorder.

Since 2001 more than 22,600 soldiers have been discharged with personality disorder (PD), saving the military billions in disability and medical benefits.

My articles on the scandal sparked a Congressional hearing, a Law and Order episode, and before leaving office, President Bush signed a law requiring the Pentagon to investigate PD discharges. In the wake of those developments, I was flooded with calls from soldiers who had fractured bones and been pierced by grenade shrapnel, only to be told that their wounds came from a problem with their personality — a pre-existing illness that had somehow gone undetected with each military screening and only popped up now, after they returned wounded from combat.

Luther was one of thousands severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan now facing a lifetime without medical care. I had spoken to dozens of soldiers in his shoes. But his call haunted me. He sent me photos of the isolation chamber. It was the size of a walk-in closet and was crammed with cardboard boxes, a desk and a bedpan. Armed guards monitored him 24 hours a day. Luther told me how they stopped him from sleeping, keeping the lights on and blasting heavy metal music at him all through the night: Megadeth, Saliva, Disturbed. When he rebelled, Luther was pinned down and injected with sleeping medication.

"This was an aid station," he said, "but it felt a lot more like enhanced interrogation than medical care."

After a month, Luther was willing to sign anything — and did. Soon after he signed his name to a personality disorder discharge, he was whisked back to Fort Hood and informed about a PD discharge's disastrous consequences. No disability pay, no long-term medical care, and because he didn't serve out his contract, he'd have to pay back a portion of his signing bonus. "They told me I now owed the Army $1,500."

I would spend the next two years investigating Luther's case: reading the stacks of medical records written by Luther's doctors, which document his confinement; talking with a fellow soldier who visited Luther during his month in the aid station; and interviewing his commander, who confirmed all the details.

This week Sergeant Luther's hellish struggle is featured on the cover of The Nation. As word of his story and the larger personality disorder scandal spreads, my phone is ringing again, this time with people asking what they can do to help these soldiers. I tell them: Share the article with friends, family, colleagues, your representatives in Congress.

America needs to know what is happening to our soldiers.

CJ's Opinion: This is the type of people we are as a nation. This is the quintessential American story. It's OK to fuck people over whenever money must be wasted on common people who aren't among the wealthy elite.

Americans like to pretend that we are caring and compassionate people, but in reality we are the epitome of evil. Each and every American, including me and you, are personally responsible for everything that happens here. This is our country - we are the monsters.

04-14 Atheists Come Out of the Closet

2010-04-14T01:34:00.000-05:00

Facebook Atheism Page

03-28 Terrorists R Us

2010-03-28T23:37:00.000-05:00

Are Republican Right Wingers Homeland Security Threats?
By Caroline Myss
March 28, 2010

Well, well, I've seen poor losers before, as have we all. But these Republicans have been poor losers since President Obama took office and now that their strategy of being the "party of NO" has failed to serve them so far as sinking the Health Care Bill, just look at their behavior. However, they've now gone beyond their trademark of "poor losers" to the status of national security threats and homeland terrorists. For all of their screaming and bullying and noise making in the Senate and House during this past year in their efforts to sabotage the Health Care Bill along with anything from the Obama administration, we would now be more than foolish to misinterpret what's really taking place in front of our eyes: These clever but cowardly Republicans have given the green light to their minions to attack their fellow countrymen who voted in favor of heath care reform in retaliation for their inability to defeat this bill.

These Republicans have, in essence, raised a call to arms against their own countrymen and women during a time when this country continues to fight a war started by Republicans for bogus reasons, a fact which we must never forget. Representative Michele Bachman from Minnesota screamed to her constituents recently, "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous ... Having a revolution every now and then is a good thing."

Representative Steve King yelled, "Let's beat that other side to a pulp! Let's take them out. Let's chase them down."

And then there's one of my favorite carnival barkers, Congressman John Boehner, "Take Steve Dryads, for example. He may be a dead man." Ah, yes. Now, how does one go from being a live man to a dead man, Congressman Boehner? Are you hinting that you or one of your cohorts are arranging for a hit man to show up at his door? Is that what you're saying here? Are you telling those of us who don't knuckle under that death threats are what we can expect from Republicans? Apparently.

Let's just consider what the Bush/Cheney administration would do to Democrats or "liberals" who tossed a few bricks into the office windows of Republican congressmen, for example. They would be arrested and labeled as "terrorists", no doubt about it. Anyone uttering threats to a congressman or woman would be immediately and without mercy tracked down like a fox on a hunt. And who knows where the poor fox would end up, if you know what I'm referring to by that comment. (Remember those concentration camps the Bush/Cheney administration set up overseas for torture in Poland and a few other countries?) And can you even imagine what would happen to a liberal (or any astute American) who tossed out a comment to, oh, say, Rove, such as, "Hey, appreciate your shredding the Constitution. Good job, there. Only thing you did well." Hum ... My guess is that person would end up with a hood over his or her head and never be seen or heard from again. I could be wrong but my memories of the Bush/Cheney love of torture, threats, bullying, lies, and negotiating the law are still all too clear. I live in fear and dread that these monsters will regain control of the White House - a nightmare that just does not stop replaying itself in my dreams. I call it "post traumatic Bush/Cheney Syndrome" and I see symptoms of this syndrome active in many people throughout the country. People are still afraid to speak out, lest they find themselves arrested for being anti-patriotic.

Continuing, I wonder what would happen to someone like that coward who accidentally cut the wrong gas line? He was aiming for Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello's house but ended up at the congressman's brother's house instead. That guy must feel like such a silly goose, going to the wrong house and all. I mean cutting a gas line is like "Vandalism 101" and he blew it. It's obvious what happened, though. This guy has the same sharp memory as Palin, only unlike Palin, he forgot to scribble the correct information on his hand. Next time you want to vandalize someone's home, buddy, use lipstick to write down what you need to remember. Pigs love lipstick. I think that's how the saying goes, isn't it? Well, whatever.

As for Sarah Palin, our Republican Court Fool, here's a sweet quote from her: "In Alaska, you know what we do with people like that? We hunt 'em down and shoot 'em between the eyes." Note that she is busy trying to backtrack on that remark and a few others like, "Don't retreat, reload", saying that she was actually referring to "voting 'em out at the polls". What? Since when is "shoot 'em between the eyes" a slogan for inspiring voting? Is this woman insane or what? Or does she think we are? Or is she coming very close to committing sedition? I remind you that this nation is still at war and inciting acts of violence against the government while the nation is at war borders on sedition. This may not be an anti-war protest in its purest sense but at its core, the ambition to weaken this government is crystal clear.

Further, do I sense a threat in these words or am I just reading between the lines? Nope, I think the word "shoot," means exactly what it says. Is she rallying the troops and suggesting that people plan the murders of their opponents? Is she supporting the assassination of Senators or Congressmen and women who are on the opposing team or, even the President? Exactly what, in her hysterical, arrogant lunacy, is she saying? Her website instructs her fan base: Don't retreat, reload.

The recent visitation of a busload of Tea Party Brown Shirts to Senator Harry Reid's home state of Nevada, threatening to oust him in the next election, revealed a crowd of angry, raging people on the verge of a fight. All they needed was a lighted match - the right or wrong word said by an opponent and all hell would have broken out. Apparently these Tea Party Brown Shirts are traveling across the country, taking their rage state-to-state, led by Court Fool Palin - or is she now a Reality Talk Show Host? (I can't keep up with all her avenues to fame and fortune, but it's obvious she'll use anything and everything to keep her face in the camera.)

Here's the bottom line, folks: The Republican right-wingers are dangerous. They should be considered homeland and homegrown security threats and we - those of us who live and vote on the other side of the aisle - are their targets. How do I know if one of these gun-toting hysterics won't let loose and "shoot to kill", following the orders of their leader, Sarah Palin? And, if Palin's too busy because of her upcoming Reality television series, I can easily imagine Michele Bachmann or John Boehner giving a "shoot to kill" command to their Tea Party followers.

Think about it - do you really feel safe in Michele Bachman's state of Minnesota any more? I'm not sure we should assume we're safe anymore at all in our own country. You better check your car bumper stickers to make certain you don't have one that reveals that you voted for Obama. After all, Bachman's encouraging her constituency to become "armed and dangerous" Americans. Last time I checked, Minnesota was not a state full of Al Qaeda terrorists, which means if armed and dangerous Minnesota folks are in the mood to go target hunting, people like you and me are in big trouble.

I have to laugh when Democrats tell their Republican counterparts to tell these right wing upstarts that they need "adult supervision" in order to quell this behavior. Adult supervision? These people need a lot more than adult supervision. These people need to be arrested - Bush style. You Republicans right-wingers love the Republicans? Try being on the receiving end of Republican justice and see how much you love your Republican Party then. Oh, and here's a solution to your angst with the Health Care Reform Bill: You tell your insurance company about all your pre-existing conditions that would have previously disqualified you from health care insurance and STAY disqualified. And keep your kids off your health care plan once they turn age-21. Adult supervision - honestly. You're assuming these Brown Shirt Tea Party hysterics are lucid, educated adults! You forget - lucid, educated adults are exactly what the Republican Party finds most threatening, which is why Republicans love the "No Child Left Behind" program. Their intention is to dumb down Americans for the sake of control - and that is no joke, people.

As if all of this brutality we are witnessing across our nation and within the Houses of government is not a horror show in and of itself, the greater truth is that what we are viewing is the authentic underbelly of the Republican Party. Lies, deceitful propaganda (remember death panels?), endless spin devised to contaminate the public mind and continually chip away at public and higher education, and use of brutality and homeland terrorism - this is the true Republican Party. This is a party who loathes the middle class much less the lower middle class and seeks to wage war legally on all Americans that they consider to be free thinkers or free loaders - "free" being the operative word. What we are looking at as we view their constant verbal and now rising physical attacks on anyone they view as an opponent/enemy is just a preview of what these people intend to do to all good Americans - Americans who believe in the rights of this nation and how this government should and must work. Should the Republicans get back into the White House (God forbid) or get control of the House and Senate again, they will initiate legislation to limit the rights of the individuals. Any and all individual rights stand in opposition to the Republican corporate creed. Just review the legislative history of the Bush/Cheney administration and then reflect upon the short and long-range consequences of the recent Supreme Court ruling that gives corporations the right to back candidates with endless financial resources. If that is not a Republican coup, what is?

If ever there was a reason to rally support around this administration to ensure it stays in office for two terms, it's not only because President Obama is a visionary saddled with cleaning up the mess of a post-Fascist administration, but you are now witnessing the true Republican creed in action: When they don't get their way, they get violent. They believe in the use of threats and they order their constituents to "shoot 'em between the eyes".

Here's a warning to all freethinking Americans: You Could Be The Next Republican Target. After all, this is the party that introduced homeland spying, the Patriot Act, and the end to all personal privacy. Given those achievements, it's not all that far-fetched that they would incite another Civil War, is it?

CJ's Opinion: In a related story…

ADRIAN, Mich. — The FBI said Sunday that agents conducted weekend raids in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and arrested at least three people, and a militia leader in Michigan said the target of at least one raid was a Christian militia group.

It begins.

03-28 Arianna Reads My Blog

2010-03-28T12:41:00.000-05:00

Sunday Roundup
By Arianna Huffington
March 28, 2010

The GOP playbook on health care only had two lines: "scare people" and "make stuff up." The result was a resounding defeat. Republicans responded to the clanging wakeup call by...offering up more of the same. This week brought the petulant shutting down of Senate committees; a desperate attempt to turn a slip of the tongue by Rep. John Dingell into a totalitarian smoking gun; and Sarah Palin adorning her Facebook page with 20 gun sights, one for each of the Democrats "targeted" by her PAC. This craziness has consequences. Witness the threats and vandalism directed at Democratic lawmakers, and the Harris poll finding that 38 percent of Republicans say Obama is doing many things Hitler did, and 24 percent believe Obama might be the Antichrist. However flawed this poll -- even if the numbers are a fraction of these -- this is certifiable. And very troubling. To quote Joe Biden: This is a big effing deal.

CJ's Opinion: In my last blog entry I said, "The scary part is that these fucked-in-the-head nut-jobs are a very large segment of American society composed of average, ordinary, everyday Americans. These aren't fringe groups - they are mainstream Americans filled with anger and hate for people who look or behave differently than they do… Americans are some seriously fucked up people."

Arianna says, "this is certifiable. And very troubling. To quote Joe Biden: This is a big effing deal."

Either Arianna has been reading my blog or we think the same way. Cool.

03-26 Ordinary Americans

2010-03-26T19:30:00.008-05:00

Whose Country Is It?
By Charles M. Blow
March 26, 2010

The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.

The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.

It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small. There is the current spattering of threats and violence, but there also is the run on guns and the explosive growth of nefarious antigovernment and anti-immigrant groups. In fact, according to a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment “patriot” groups more than tripled over that period.

Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement. It may have some legitimate concerns (taxation, the role of government, etc.), but its message is lost in the madness. And now the anemic Republican establishment, covetous of the Tea Party’s passion, is moving to absorb it, not admonish it. Instead of jettisoning the radical language, rabid bigotry and rising violence, the Republicans justify it. (They don’t want to refute it as much as funnel it.)

There may be a short-term benefit in this strategy, but it’s a long-term loser.

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

CJ's Opinion: Far-right extremists: a bunch of extremely angry racists, misogynists, homophobes, and anti-Semites. The scary part is that these fucked-in-the-head nut-jobs are a very large segment of American society composed of average, ordinary, everyday Americans. These aren't fringe groups - they are mainstream Americans filled with anger and hate for people who look or behave differently than they do.

You're afraid of terrorists? I've got news for you - the terrorists are us. Americans are some seriously fucked up people.

03-22 Up Yours

2010-03-22T15:40:00.000-05:00

Good Wins Over Evil. Period.
By Michael Seitzman
March 22, 2010

Anything that makes John Boener scream like the melting Wicked Witch is something I know instinctively must be a good thing. Yes, it's very trendy to say "it's not perfect," and "it's not everything we wanted," but the passage of the health care bill in the House yesterday is a bold step forward in the right direction and has provisions with real teeth and genuine progress. Just as importantly, it's a crushing defeat to those who continue to lie, bully, patronize and insult the people they claim to represent.

Bipartisanship can kiss my ass. Seducing, pleasing and appeasing the current Republican Party is as interesting to me as lopping off an arm. These people have allowed themselves to be taken over by extremists, imbeciles, racists, fear-mongers and ignorant thugs. They choose circus politics over good policy, the popularity of the mediocre and incompetent over responsibility, intelligence and common sense. The Republican political bible begins with the god Karl Rove, exalts cartoon prophets like George W. Bush, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and demands its disciples receive communion from lunatic priests Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The Right laughably and transparently throws around euphemistic bumper-sticker words like "small government" and "socialism" to thinly disguise their real agenda to relieve your conscience of any inconvenient feelings of responsibility toward your fellow humans.

I'm sure there are real arguments to be made from genuine conservatives but this crowd is not making them. I have friends and family members who talk passionately and intelligently about their conservative point of view, and sometimes I even agree with them, but this party, right now, at this moment, isn't interested in intelligent debate. Watch any five minutes of Fox News and you'll smell the familiar and sickening whiff of indifference, intolerance and naked cruelty.

Now take a look at the victors in yesterday's vote. What is their agenda? To provide health care to the people who don't have it, to prevent loss of coverage when you lose your job, to prevent the denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, to prevent your children from being denied coverage. Monsters, right? Un-American beasts! I'm sure you can understand why so-called protesters spewed racial, anti-Semitic and homophobic epithets at United States Congressmen on their way to vote for such "Nazi" legislation (yeah, the Nazis were really big on health care). These people aren't activists, they're a mob.

Make no mistake, this isn't an argument between thoughtful people with opposing viewpoints. This is a fight between good and evil. Good won yesterday. But as in any epic story, the villain doesn't go down easily and these particular villains continue to be formidable. But today the heroes have a right to stand tall and proud.

CJ's Opinion: One of these lunatics posted the following message at the Join Coffee Party Movement Chicago Facebook page…

John Baptist: say good bye to freedom and welcome to the USSA

He received the following response from a Coffee Party member…

Edward Zelnis: Yep, when the democratically elected President and the elected majority in Congress deliver on what they campaigned on, it's time to break out the brown uniforms and armbands.

My responses tend to be a tad less polite. These people - no, that's too nice of a description for them. These fucked-in-the-head lunatics don't deserve to breathe the air; they are a waste of perfectly good oxygen. They want to kill me by denying me healthcare because I'm not a good Capitalist? FUCK! THEM!

03-22 Game On!

2010-03-22T01:18:00.000-05:00

War of Choice: Part 2
By Steven Weber
March 22, 2010

If all those who oppose President Obama on any and everything that comes out of his presidency based not on the facts but solely on ideological bias, you squander the only real hope this country has.

For, to maintain America's relevance in an evolving world, America must embrace its sons.

To describe President Obama in any way which equates him with the low, inane betrayals currently emanating from a right wing is to finally acknowledge and openly embrace what the world has always known: your sustenance flows from toxic corporate interests which hate people, hate progress, hate truth.

It is that simple.

The opposition cannot use truth to refute this. They must, based on the desperate tenor and spittle-flecked ferocity of their vitriol, use terror to distract, misdirect and confuse. Because that is what the success of their agenda depends on.

Obama's agenda -- and the nation's -- depends on hope.

And so in the coming months and years, the real war (as opposed to the manufactured ones favored by the right wing) must be fully funded and furiously waged.

Because it is a war for truth. Armed with a successfully enacted program for progress and led by an articulate, capable and intelligent leader, the war for truth being waged against the corporate funded right wing hate machine and its ragged army of misinformed, terrified bigots will be won decisively.

The passing of health care reform, imperfect though it may be at this all important nascent stage, is the first step.

CJ's Opinion: I was completely demoralized be President Obama's previous lackluster performance; he has now vindicated himself. And I am back - with a vengeance!

03-21 We Win

2010-03-21T23:15:00.000-05:00

WE WIN! WE WIN! WE WIN!

03-19 Stupak Ignorance

2010-03-19T19:35:00.000-05:00

My Congressman, Bart Stupak, Has Neither a Uterus Nor a Brain
By Michael Moore
March 19, 2010

Friends,

I live in Michigan, in one of the 31 counties represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by none other than Mr. Bart Stupak, a Democrat. You've probably never heard of him. He's a pretty quiet guy, a former Michigan State Police trooper who boldly decided to run some 18 years ago as a Democrat in a rural part of Michigan that votes almost exclusively for Republicans (yes, I know -- what am I doing here? I'll save that story for a future letter).

His voting record is pretty conservative for a Democrat, but he's had a few shining moments. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, he voted for some gun control, a not-too-popular position to take here in northern Michigan. The NRA came after him with all they had in 2000.

But the good people of this area knew Bart's story and understood: He's been touched personally by gun violence. In a terrible tragedy, his teenage son, depressed and confused from the medication he'd been prescribed, killed himself with the family's .38 revolver. Despite the NRA's best efforts, Bart was returned to Congress by an overwhelming margin.

Yet, here we are, just days before a weak, simple-minded, but now ultimately necessary health care bill has a chance of making it through Congress -- and Bart Stupak is threatening to derail it because he wants to make sure that no woman who buys her own insurance with her own money is able to have a medically-insured abortion. We're not talkin' about federally-funded abortions -- those were stupidly outlawed long ago. Bart Stupak doesn't like that the Democrats' bill doesn't prohibit private insurance programs, set up for those whose employers don't provide it, from providing abortion coverage if they get any federal funding -- even to an individual woman paying without any government help. That's it.

A group representing most of America's 59,000 Catholic nuns has written to Congress and said that Obama's health care plan should be passed. Stupak, instead, has chosen to diss the nuns. Last night he went on TV and dug his heels in -- he said he intended to stop this health care bill and he didn't care what anyone had to say.

Now, it would be easy for some to just pass this attitude off on his Catholicism -- he believes what he believes and you have to respect him for that, even if you don't agree with him. But it's not that simple. It turns out that Stupak has been living in a subsidized room in the "C Street House," run by the infamous right-wing Christian cult "The Family." It was in this former convent that GOP Rep. Chip Pickering (according to his former wife) carried on the affair that ended his marriage. It's where South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford sought refuge as his marriage fell apart thanks to his affair. And then there's C Street roommate Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who cheated on his wife with the wife of one of his top staffers. (The Justice Department is currently investigating whether Ensign committed a felony while paying off his aide to keep him quiet.)

C Street is where power, money, sex and religion meet. So am I led to believe that Bart Stupak lives in a brothel and belongs to a cult? He says he was just renting a room there. But that just doesn't ring true. Something stinks to the high heavens here, and Stupak sees no irony in taking his holier-than-thou position while living in a house that should be dubbed "Hypocrites' Hideaway."

If Stupak were truly pro-life then he'd vote for this bill. Right now, a mother in the U.S. has a ten times greater chance of dying in childbirth than a mother does in Ireland. If you really wanted to reduce abortions, you'd have to ask yourself this question: Why does godless France, where abortion is nearly free (it's covered by their universal health insurance), have 20% fewer abortions per capita than we do? What's even more amazing about that statistic is that you can't even get an abortion in America in 87% of our counties because there isn't one single doctor in those counties who will perform one! 87%!! The Right has scared them to death -- sometimes literally -- out of performing an otherwise legal, safe procedure. So, you can say women have "choice" in this country, but the reality is the "choice" doesn't exist in the majority of the nation. "Right to Life" has essentially won this battle. (My personal position: I don't get to have a position -- I don't have a uterus. If a Senate that was 90% female told me I couldn't have a vasectomy or made it a crime to leave the toilet seat up, I guess I might object.)

What is "life"? An egg is life, a sperm is life. Those sperm aren't running on a battery pack. They are living creatures, as is a fertilized egg. But they're not "human beings." A human being is something that can exist outside the womb of a mother. If you think a fertilized egg is a human being, then I respectfully ask you to go down to the DMV today and have them change your birthday on your driver's license to 9 months older than what you've been telling everybody.

So back to my question. Why do we have an abortion rate 20% higher than France's (and more than twice as high as Germany's), especially considering most doctors here won't perform them? The answer is any country that has universal health care, where contraception is free, where child care is free or inexpensive, where there is less poverty because people don't become bankrupt over medical bills -- those societies are simply going to have fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

And there the mask gets pulled off the Bart Stupaks and the "Christians." If the statistics show that countries with government-provided universal health care and nearly-free abortions are, in fact, the countries with the fewest abortions, then why on earth wouldn't the Right be the first in line to support universal health care?

Because it isn't about "universal health care." It's about controlling women, period. It's about sticking your nose in other people's business. It's about pushing your religious beliefs on everyone else because voices in your head tell you your Jesus is The One -- even though your Jesus never said one single solitary word in any of the four gospels of the Bible about abortion or fertilized eggs being human. You've just gone and made it up about "life beginning at conception." Jesus never said that. The little voice in your head said that, the same little voice that wants your grubby paws on women's uteruses. You need help. Please get some help and leave the rest of us alone, Mr. Stupak and friends.

After all, isn't it enough that women can't get an abortion in any of the 31 Michigan counties you represent in Congress? There is not one single abortion provider here in the north of the state, according to Planned Parenthood Mid and South Michigan. Hey, Bart -- you've already won! Women's rights have been stamped out in your entire Congressional district! Woo hoo!

So why don't you leave the rest of the country alone, step out of the way, and let them have the minimal health coverage this bill will give them? You wouldn't really crush the sick and infirm because of your own personal agenda, would you? What would Jesus do?

In the meantime, Bart, my neighbors and I are going to make sure a real Democrat runs against you in August's primary here. One of our religious beliefs in these parts is to never impose our religious beliefs on others.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

03-13 Republican (American) Cowardice

2010-03-13T07:38:00.002-06:00

Fearful and Scheming Republicans Are Playing into al-Qaida's Strategy
By Mitchell Bard
March 12, 2010

You might have missed an AP article on al-Qaeda that slipped nearly unnoticed through yesterday's news cycle. The piece reports that the terrorist operation is moving towards smaller-scale attacks like the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit. Why? For a reason the Republicans will not like very much.

First, one thing that is important to consider, which is not addressed in the article, is that recent U.S. successes in counter-terrorism (under the administration of a president Republicans insist is endangering the country's security) have weakened al-Qaeda's financial and operational power. As we learned today from Nicholas Sabloff and Nico Pitney, al-Qaeda's declining strength, along with the Obama administration's effective anti-terrorism efforts, have led to the Taliban moving to distance itself from al-Qaeda.

The main argument of the AP article is that al-Qaeda has figured out that it can cause chaos even with a failed attack (like the Christmas Day attempted bombing), because, in essence, terrified Republicans lose their minds and try to score political points by criticizing the administration, resulting in the exact kind of panic and uncertainty al-Qaeda leaders are looking for. Put another way, the Republicans are, in their fear and cold political calculation, doing exactly what al-Qaeda leaders want them to do.

This shouldn't be shocking to read. After all, George W. Bush's ineffective, misguided, fear-infused, ideology-driven response to the 9/11 attacks -- invading Iraq, moving the focus away from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, curbing civil rights, generating ill feelings around the world, spreading and fraying American military capabilities, running up a massive debt through two unpaid-for wars, and running the U.S. economy into the ground -- played right into al-Qaeda's hands. In fact, it's likely that if Osama bin Laden could have written a script for Bush on Sept. 12, 2001, it wouldn't have looked much different from what Bush actually did in the next few years.

I am tired of Republicans weakening our country through their dual obsessions: fear and putting scoring political points against the president over the best interests of the American people. As Steve Benen perceptively observed after the Christmas Day attempted bombing, the Republican response was "a collective display of pants-wetting." What has happened to the party of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne? Of G. Gordon Liddy putting his hand in a flame? The narrative in the country was always that the Republicans were the tough guys and the Democrats were the wimps, and while I admit the GOP shows more balls in governing than the timid Democrats, when it comes to terrorism, it seems quite clear the parties' actions don't match the reputations anymore.

On issue after issue, the Democrats have shown resolve in the face of the terrorists (at least until their resolve wavers under political pressure), while the Republicans have shown nothing but panic and opportunism. Get an enemy leader in your custody and what do you do? Republicans, in fear, scream, "Torture him until he talks!", while Democrats are braver, putting the principles on which the nation was founded above the fear of attack (putting aside for a second the fact that torture isn't effective; as we saw yesterday, you can get information from prisoners without torturing them). How do you bring one of these leaders to justice? Again, the Republicans are all about fear. "We can't try them in court! We can't have them in our borders, even in our highest-security prison! What if they escape? They can hurt us! The country isn't strong enough to handle it!" Meanwhile, Democrats say (again, at least until they bend to political pressure), "We are a strong enough country that we don't have to drop everything we believe in to keep these criminals in Cuba. We are strong enough to safely imprison them in this country, and our justice system has the capacity to try and convict these individuals for their crimes."

And when it comes to terror attacks? After the Christmas Day attempted attack, the Obama administration quickly looked into what happened and what could be improved in anti-terrorism policy for the future. The Republicans? Their response involved pointing fingers of blame and fearfully complaining we weren't safe. They resembled a woman in a 1940s Hollywood movie jumping on a table to avoid a mouse on the ground.

I thought as Americans we pride ourselves on our resilience and courage? Is it only the members of the military who have to display these traits? During World War II, citizens stepped up, rationed goods that were in short supply, and worked in the factories to help supply the military. We, as a country, stood together and showed toughness, sending a message we wouldn't be bullied out of our way of life by the Nazis. Now? Republicans seem not to trust our military and intelligence apparatuses to protect us. They are driven by fear. I'm sick of it.

It's time for Republicans to show the same steeliness in opposing Osama bin Laden that they do opposing the president.

Which brings us to the second part of the Republicans' conduct that helps al-Qaida and makes us less safe: the political calculation. When Bush was in office, if a Democrat merely suggested that maybe the president's policies in Iraq weren't working, he or she was accused of not being patriotic. What a difference a few years make. The rules have apparently changed. Now, every terrorist incident seems to be treated by the GOP as a chance to score points against Obama, with no concern that the bickering and false accusations not only unsettle Americans, but that the reaction is exactly what the terrorists want. Of course, I would never argue that a member of Congress should not speak out if he or she honestly believes a government policy is putting us at risk. But do you really think the Republican outrage is sincere? Given that Obama has been, by any measure, more successful weakening al-Qaida than Bush ever was, it's particularly odious the way the Republicans have tried to stir fear by questioning the Obama administration's commitment to fighting terrorism.

Simply put, the "collective display of pants-wetting" and politicization of terrorism by the Republicans are making America less safe. I wish the GOP would find its inner John Wayne. It's hard enough to fight those willing to die in the pursuit of harming Americans without fearful Republicans seeking to score political points making the terrorists' job easier.

03-12 They'll Kill To Keep Their Jobs

2010-03-12T08:33:00.000-06:00

A Disgrace for the Democrats
By Michael Tomasky
11 March 2010

Obama's congressmen will sabotage the health bill to keep their seats. It is stomach-churning.

In our House of Representatives – "the people's body" – the Democrats at this moment enjoy a gaudy 75-seat majority. Wait. Did I just put "Democrats" and "enjoy" in the same sentence? Scratch that. The Democrats suffer the affliction of a 75-seat majority. That's a joke, except not really. What is going on right now in the lower house vis a vis healthcare reform is a stomach-turning sight to behold – a saga of preening, duplicity, pomposity, self-interest and, most of all, cowardice that is worthy of Holinshed. The players in this drama are participating in the destruction of their own party. They know this. And they persist.

What's happening right now, of course, is that Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, and President Barack Obama, are trying to round up the votes in the house to pass the Senate's health bill. Exactly 216 are needed. Right now they have 194. Or 202. Or 210. Or something. But not 216.

So Pelosi is on the prowl for yes votes. The house passed its version of the bill last November by five votes, 220-215. At the time, 39 Democrats voted against it. This probably sounds strange to British readers, but it's how the Democratic party does things. Lots of Democrats – 49 of them, in fact – represent districts where John McCain defeated Obama. They live in fear of being tarred by a future Republican opponent of having abetted the march of socialism. So they voted no on the most important piece of social legislation that body has had before it in probably 40 years.

Now, under our somewhat arcane rules of legislation, the house must vote on the matter again. But this time its members will vote on the Senate version of the bill, different in certain ways. More centrist, really. Pelosi is working behind the scenes. The moment she feels certain she has 216 votes, she'll call a vote, the bill will pass and the corks will pop. And if that moment never arrives, there will likely be no vote. The alleged deadline (there is no statutory deadline, just a sort of media-suggested one) is Easter.

And, this time around, there is considerably more at stake than there was last November. We're in an election year now (all members of the house must stand). It is, to use an American metaphor, the bottom of the ninth inning. That means the last chance of success. And what are Democrats doing?

Making demands. Hamleting away ostentatiously on cable television. Living in mortal fear that they might lose their seats. But are they thinking about how to fix the bloated mess that is American healthcare, or serve their uninsured and underinsured constituents? Maybe in private, but certainly not in public.

Here's the situation. Everyone knows that if reform passes, it's a historic accomplishment for the party and the president. Yes, Republicans will attack it as a government takeover of the health sector. But at least Democrats will be able to say that on the matter on which they spent months and months, they finally won. And – this part is more important – everyone knows that if it fails, it's a historic setback for the party and the president. This fall's elections could be a total wipeout for Democrats.

Everyone knows this. And yet, some Democrats will still oppose it. Why? For two reasons. First, some, especially among those aforementioned 49, will face well-financed Grand Old Party opponents and lose. In fairness to them, that's actually a somewhat logical analysis.

But second, we move from logic to the realm of psychology. Passage of a big health reform bill is a classic Rumsfeldian "unknown unknown". Congress hasn't passed a bill like this in, as I said, four decades. What will happen? What spites and furies will be unleashed? It will alter the political landscape for years to come. But how?

Politicians dread these questions. So, far better that there's no vote at all. That's a known. They can go back to their districts and say: "Well, we moved too fast, Obama overreached, and now we'll start again at square one." That, of course, won't happen. Reform will die. But that's what they'll say. And they'll return to their collective 13% (you read that right) job approval rating and their nice important jobs in a body that is a national laughing stock and is institutionally incapable of taking actual steps to fix actual problems in American society.

Or they can take a little risk on what will be for most of them the single most substantively consequential vote of their entire careers, even understanding (horror) that some of them might lose in the election. We can't have that, right? God forbid someone lose a seat in Congress. Life itself will end. I mean, what an unimaginable existence: getting a well-paying job as a lobbyist or corporate rainmaker, being called "congressman" for the rest of your life, drawing a congressional pension – and, by the way, congressional healthcare … Dante himself couldn't have imagined such a savage circle of hell.

I should note that there exists a small handful of Democrats who should fairly be given a pass on the vote. They have no seniority, no long-term relationships with the constituents, and come from deep-red districts. They number around 15 or so.

But the others? Disgraceful. Virtually all of them have tens of thousands, or sometimes more than 100,000, adult constituents with no private insurance. If they're not in Washington to do something about that, then what are they there to do? Please don't answer that question.

03-03 Michael Moore Quote

2010-03-03T11:14:00.000-06:00

"You know, I tell you, these Democrats are disgusting. Wimps and wusses and weasels. You know, get some spine. This is why I have to admire the Republicans. They at least stand for something. They at least have the courage of their convictions. They get elected to office, they come into town, and they go "Get outta my way, there's a new sheriff in town. This is the way we're doing things. Get outta here." And then they do it. You know. I mean what they do is crazy. But dammit, they are good at it. We should take a page out of their book."

03-02 The Rotten Core

2010-03-02T19:52:00.000-06:00

Green-Bashing Exposes the Rot at the Core of Modern Conservatism
By Peter Daou
March 2, 2010

Of all the wrongheaded ideas proudly trumpeted by America's right, anti-environmentalism occupies a unique position: it is at once the most devoid of a rational or moral foundation and the most dangerous. Let's not mince words: it is selfish, crass, illogical, willfully blind, a denial of the undeniable reality that humans are pillaging irreplaceable natural resources and spewing filth into the air and water and soil at unsustainable rates.

Green-bashers stubbornly negate what is directly before them. In the face of irrefutable evidence that environmental degradation is a mortal threat, they put their hands over their ears, shut their eyes and scream, "Not true!"

This isn't about good faith questioning of science, much as these naysayers pretend it is. It isn't about genuine skepticism, much as they want to believe it is. There is no moral imperative underlying their belief (or lack thereof). It's about unbridled hostility at the suggestion that we must all make shared sacrifices. It's about refusing to acknowledge that the environmental movement has been right to sound the alarm. It's about laziness. And greed. And irresponsibility. And colossal shortsightedness.

Forget about the tragedy of the commons, this is the abject and gleeful refutation of common sense. Green-bashing exposes the rot at the core of modern conservatism.

Nothing illustrates it better than the impossibly inane assertion, touted far and wide on the right, that this winter's heavy northeast snowstorms somehow disprove global warming. A five-year-old can understand the difference between climate and weather, but apparently it is beyond the ken of grown-up conservatives.

What's even more absurd about this mother of all absurd claims is that even if you play their silly game and focus on a single year's data and extrapolate, the conservative argument falls apart. Paul Krugman explains:

If you think conservatives are freaking out over the growing prospects that health care reform will, in fact, happen, wait until you see the freakout over climate change. You see, a snowy winter in the northeast United States was supposed to have proved the climate skeptics right, after all. But a funny thing happened while they were celebrating: globally, this is shaping up as the warmest winter on record.

Green-bashers have had a banner year -- they found a couple of openings, some hacked emails, a few scientists being flawed humans rather than data-processing automatons, and they went ballistic. With funding from big oil, they've engaged in an all-out assault on science and reason, and this assault has been tepidly rebutted, if at all. The rightwing message machine has been in high gear, blasting out misinformation and pseudo-science, cynically sowing doubt. Climate change denialism is just one aspect of anti-environmentalism. Flush from the success of eviscerating meaningful health care reform, conservatives will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the entire environmental movement.

We can go on forever patiently explaining the facts. How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic is a good start. Or Al Gore's latest. But this is clearly more than a debate over facts and figures. This is all-out war.

Just ponder how conservatives have turned Gore's name into a rallying cry against environmentalism, against progressivism. It's a testament to the power of framing and messaging -- and the hollowness of today's conservative thinking. To the conservative mind, President Obama can be successfully attacked for wanting to provide health care while George Bush was cheered for treating the Constitution like toilet paper and making war under false pretenses. Similarly, Al Gore can be maligned and despised for trying to protect future generations. You'd think he was trying to kill babies. Think I'm exaggerating? That's exactly what a popular rightwing blogger just accused him of doing.

Another conservative writer goes on about "unsettled science," as though we were engaging in a hypothetical legal exercise about the merits of reasonable doubt. In fact, this is our only planet. It's the only place we can survive. We can't afford to take chances. We can't afford to do anything less than everything in our power to rectify the problem. We have no choice but to be alarmists -- there's no second chance. We get it wrong and we've doomed our children and their children. For what? Because we don't want to recycle? Because we don't want to stop polluting? Because we don't want to bother making sacrifices? Because we don't want some eager young kid who cares about the earth to dictate to us? Because we don't like Al Gore? How profoundly selfish can someone be, to deny what they see with their own eyes: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways, in our food, filth we create in immense quantities turning our planet into a garbage dump.

If anything, we should be outdoing one another trying to address the issue, not smugly questioning the need for action under the guise that the science is imperfect. Reversing the damage we're doing to the earth should be a priority for every citizen. Instead, environmentalism is treated like an annoyance that the media will occasionally poll about and that we bring to the fore once every April.

Am I being hyperbolic? It depends on how big you think the stakes are. For me, it's about my daughter's future. The air she breathes. The food she eats. The atmosphere that sustains her.

Frankly, I hope global warming science is faulty. I hope the Republicans who are "co-sponsoring a resolution stating that climate change is a "conspiracy" and urging the EPA to "immediately halt" all efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions" are right.

But even if it's a 50-50 chance that they're not, how on earth can I dismiss the threat? How can I be so glib, so righteous? How can I live on this precious planet, floating in the middle of nowhere, knowing there's nowhere else for my fellow living beings to go, and risk ruining it? What does it cost me to be vigilant, to care for my home, to be as clean and responsible as I can possibly be, to heed warnings, to live with respect and within sustainable means?

Read the full article here.

02-24 Republican Values

2010-02-24T08:24:00.000-06:00

Republican Party values money more than people
By William Krebes, Hobart
February 23, 2010

The Republicans have lost the values of the political party that Abraham Lincoln was representative of in 1860. Lincoln believed that all men were created equal and slavery was an evil that must be eradicated. His ideas were to eliminate not just physical slavery but economic slavery as well.

The goal of the Republican Party for the last couple of decades has been to gain control of our government and put the power into the hands of the rich. It toils endlessly to give corporations more rights than individuals, as proved in the ruling on campaign financing by Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices.

The GOP values the power of its party more than the needs of the country. The GOP strives not to eliminate poverty but to broaden it so the power it has over the people is increased.

Republicans attest to being Christians but repeatedly do things to their fellow man that are not within the guidelines of the Bible. Waging an unjust war (Iraq) or denying health care is not an acceptable value judgment. Republicans support Wall Street, which has caused many Americans to become homeless. The billions of dollars of surplus that we once had were thrown into the pockets of the rich by the Bush administration.

There is no value to promoting fear and distrust of our brothers and sisters because of ethnic and cultural differences. There is no value to lies, deceptions and falsehoods spread by the Republican Party. President Obama was born in the United States. Helping people obtain an education, work, food or health care does not make us socialists; it makes us Americans.

Certainly the warped and deformed values of the Republican Party of today weaken the fabric of our society and pose a greater danger to America than anything else in the world.

A society based on democratic rule is the most valuable possession of the people.

02-06 The Real Problem

2010-02-06T11:23:00.002-06:00

Down With the People
Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.
By Jacob Weisberg
February 6, 2010

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state's bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya's), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The politicians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimism, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

01-18 A Surrender Flag

2010-01-18T22:30:00.001-06:00

A Wake Up Call
By Robert Kuttner
January 17, 2010

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Polls show that the public now opposes it by margins averaging ten to fifteen points, and widening. It is hard to know which will be the worse political defeat -- losing the bill and looking weak, or passing it and leaving it as a piñata for Republicans to attack between now and November.

The measure is so unpopular that Republican State Senator Scott Brown has built his entire surge against Coakley around his promise to be the 41st senator to block the bill -- this in Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts. He must be pretty confident that the bill has become politically radioactive, and he's right.

It has already brought down Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a fighter for health care and other reforms far more progressive than President Obama's. Dorgan championed Americans' right to re-import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, a popular provision that the White House blocked. Dorgan, who is one of the Senate's great populists, began the year more than twenty points ahead in the polls of his most likely challenger, North Dakota Governor John Hoeven. By the time he decided to call it a day, Dorgan was running more than twenty points behind. The difference was the health bill, which North Dakotans oppose by nearly two to one. The fact that Dorgan's own views were much better than the Administration's cut little ice. He was fatally associated with an unpopular bill.

So, how did Democrats get saddled with this bill? Begin with Rahm Emanuel. The White House chief of staff, who was once Bill Clinton's political director, drew three lessons from the defeat of Clinton-care. All three were wrong. First, get it done early (Clinton's task force had dithered.) Second, leave the details to Congress (Clinton had presented Congress with a fully-baked cake.) Third, don't get on the wrong side of the insurance and drug industries (The insurers' fictitious couple, Harry and Louise, had cleaned Clinton's clock.)

But as I wrote in Obama's Challenge, in August 2008, it would be a huge mistake to try to get health care done right out of the box. Obama first needed to get his sea-legs, and focus like a laser on economic recovery. If he got the economy back on track, he would then have earned the chops to undertake more difficult structural reforms like health care.

Deferring to the House and Senate was fine up to a point, but this was an issue where the president needed to lead as only presidents can -- in order to frame the debate and define the stakes.

Cutting a deal with the insurers and drug companies, who are not exactly candidates to win popularity contests, associated Obama with profoundly resented interest groups. This was exactly the wrong framing. This battle should have been the president and the people versus the interests. Instead more and more voters concluded that it was the president and the interests versus the people.

As policy, the interest-group strategy made it impossible to put on the table more fundamental and popular reforms, such as using Federal bargaining power to negotiate cheaper drug prices, or having a true public option like Medicare-for-all. Instead, a bill that served the drug and insurance industries was almost guaranteed to have unpopular core elements.

The politics got horribly muddled. By embracing a deal that required the government to come up with a trillion dollars of subsidy for the insurance industry, Obama was forced to pursue policies that were justifiably unpopular -- such as taxing premiums of people with decent insurance; or compelling people to buy policies that they often couldn't afford, or diverting money from Medicare. He managed to scare silly the single most satisfied clientele of our one island of efficient single-payer health insurance -- senior citizens -- and to alienate one of his most loyal constituencies, trade unionists.

The bill helped about two-thirds of America's uninsured, but did almost nothing for the 85 percent of Americans with insurance that is becoming more costly and unreliable by the day -- except frighten them into believing that what little they have is at increased risk of being taken away.

All of this made things easier for the right, and left people to take seriously even preposterous allegations such as the nonsense about death panels. It got so ass-backwards that the other day Ben Nelson, who successfully held out for anti-abortion language and a sweetheart deal for Nebraska's Medicaid as the price of his vote, found himself facing a wholesale voter backlash.

Nelson began running TV spots assuring Nebraska voters that the Obama health plan is "not run by the government." That's one hell of a slogan for a party that relies on democratically elected government to offset the insecurity, inequality and insanity generated by private commercial forces. If not-run-by-government is the Democrats' credo, why bother?

So we went from a politics in which government is necessary to provide secure health insurance -- because the private insurance industry skims off outrageous middlemen fees and discriminates against sick people -- to a politics in which Democrats, as a matter of survival, feel they have to apologize for government. Thank you, Rahm Emanuel.

The budget-obsessives around Obama also insisted that most of the bill not take effect until 2013, so that all of the scary stuff gets three years to fester before most people see any benefit. Call it political malpractice.

Finally, the health insurance battle sucked out all the oxygen. When Obama made time to work the phones personally, it wasn't to enact serious financial reform (this was left to the tender mercies of Tim Geithner) or to fight for a real jobs program (deficit hawks Peter Orszag and Larry Summers got to blunt that one). No -- Obama got on the phone and met with legislators to round up the last vote or two for a sketchy health reform that crowded out far more urgent issues.

As a resident of Massachusetts, in the last two days I've gotten robo calls from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Martha Coakley, and Angela Menino, the wife of Boston's mayor -- everyone but the sainted Ted Kennedy. In Obama's call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, "because I'm fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care." Let's see, would that be the same insurance industry that Rahm was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama's bill as sensible reform?

If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.

Looking forward, one can imagine several possibilities. Suppose Coakley loses. Obama and the House leadership may then decide that their one shot to salvage health reform after all this effort is for the House to just pass the Senate-approved bill and send it to the president's desk. They can fix its deficiencies later. This is an easy parliamentary move. But the bill passed the House by only five votes; many House members are dead set against some of the more objectionable provisions of the Senate bill; a Coakley loss would make the bill that much more politically toxic; there will be Republican catcalls that Congress is using dubious means to pass a bill that has just been politically repudiated; and the House votes just may not be there this time.

Alternatively, let's say Coakley narrowly wins, the Democrats have a near death experience, and the House and Senate stop squabbling and pass the damned bill.

Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.

Michael's Unconditional Surrender: It's looking more and more like Obama fucked up everything he touched. Everything! He's a fucking loser and I'm sorry I voted for the piece of shit moron. Oh fucking well. I've had it. I can't take it anymore. I give up. The assholes win. Fuck you very much. I am outta here!

01-16 Breaking (non)News Report

2010-01-16T10:31:00.000-06:00

Don't give Haitians a penny, says rightwing US shock jock
By Chris McGreal
15 January 2010

Amid the rash of appeals for Haiti donations has come a call from one of the most prominent voices on the American right for people to hang on to their cash because Barack Obama might steal it.

Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio talkshow host, who is sometimes described as the real leader of the Republican party, says Americans should not give a penny to a population struggling for survival after the earthquake.

Limbaugh agreed with a caller suspicious that the White House website was being used to direct funds to the American Red Cross. "Would you trust the money's gonna go to Haiti?" the caller asked. Limbaugh then said Obama was exploiting the disaster for political ends.

"This [the earthquake] will play right into Obama's hands," said Limbaugh. "He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community – both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. This is made to order for them."

Limbaugh also warned Americans against donating money. "Besides, we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the US income tax," he said.

The movie critic Roger Ebert responded with an open letter to Limbaugh: "Tens of thousands are believed still alive beneath the rubble. You twisted their suffering into an opportunity to demean the character of the president."

The evangelical leader Pat Robertson has also drawn criticism for suggesting Haiti had brought decades of torment on itself by making a pact with the devil to end French rule. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, described Robertson's remarks as "utterly stupid".

He also condemned Limbaugh: "I think to use the power of your pulpit to try to convince those not to help their brothers and sisters is sad," he said.

Crass remarks were not restricted to rightwing Americans. A senior Haitian diplomat was caught on camera claiming the earthquake would be good for his country and appearing to blame the catastrophe on "witchcraft".

Speaking before an interview on Brazilian TV, Haiti's consul in São Paulo, George Samuel Antoine, said: "This catastrophe is good for us here, it will make us known."

CJ's Opinion: So what's new? You just now figured this out? Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson are just two Conservative American Pigs who are willing to openly speak the mainstream opinions of a nation chock-full of vile Conservative American Pigs. Get a clue, will ya?

01-15 American Justice

2010-01-15T19:49:00.000-06:00

Sentenced to Abuse
The New York Times Editorial
January 14, 2010

The Justice Department needs to act swiftly and decisively to protect young people who are being battered and raped in juvenile corrections facilities all across the country. A shocking new study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics surveyed more than 9,000 young people in custody and found that 12 percent reported being sexually abused one or more times, mainly by staff members.

Particularly alarming, the study found several juvenile facilities where 30 percent or more of the young people reported being raped. Some of the institutions with high rates of victimization were in Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas.

These latest findings are consistent with those reported in June by a federal commission created by Congress under the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act. The commission, which examined the problem for five years, also outlined a list of sensible policy changes, which the Justice Department has the power to make mandatory for all corrections institutions that accept federal money.

The commission said that corrections facilities must make it easier for victims to report abuse without fear of reprisal and promptly and thoroughly investigate all rape claims. It said that prison employees must be better screened before they are hired, and they must be better trained in how to deal with vulnerable young people.

The commission also called on state corrections agencies to develop written zero-tolerance rules for employees of adult and juvenile facilities — and write those rules into union contracts. Employees must be put on notice that they will be held accountable if they participate in sexual assaults or look the other way when they occur.

The 2003 law gave the United States attorney general until June of this year to evaluate the commission’s findings and issue new rape-prevention standards. But juvenile justice advocates worry that the Justice Department will allow state corrections officials to water down those requirements, partly by arguing that they will be too expensive to implement. The department should not allow that to happen. If it does, Congress will have to strengthen the legislation. Zero tolerance for abuse in prisons or juvenile facilities must be the law of the land.

CJ's Opinion: This is exactly the type of third world brutality that is rampant in the American penal system. These are typical, upstanding American citizens perpetrating these brutal acts of rape and violence against young people who are not able to defend themselves. And I'm sure you are PROUD PROUD PROUD to be an American, aren't you?! I hope you all rot in HELL!!! You Fucking Pigs!!!

01-15 Liberal Losers

2010-01-15T12:24:00.001-06:00

Visclosky deserves civility at his forums
Indiana Post-Tribune Editorial
January 15, 2010

U.S. Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Merrillville, has been exposed to the best and worst of his constituency as he hosted town hall forums over the past two weeks.

At forums in Hobart and at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, those in attendance were polite and asked probing questions about the war in Afghanistan, the future of health care and government spending.

It was a different story at forums in Cedar Lake, Hebron and Crown Point. We won't attempt to identify the people by groups, but simply say they were disgusting, unruly and an embarrassment.

At the Hebron forum, a man called President Obama a communist and Visclosky a coward. The accuser, who refused to give his name, was the coward. No one in government who takes the time to host a public forum deserves to be insulted.

At the Hebron, Crown Point and Cedar Lake forums, people hollered at will, often not allowing Visclosky to answer questions. There was no proper discussion.

These aren't people who for the most part are concerned about America, but people with a neo-conservative political agenda bent on disrupting a public forum simply for the sake of publicity.

So inane were most in attendance that some resurrected the Sarah Palin lie that Democrats are including senior citizen "death panels" in the health care proposals.

What Visclosky is facing is reminiscent of the Tea Party people disrupting congressional forums held across the country -- largely on the issue of health care -- in August.

Everyone, of course, has the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech. But to disrupt public forums through shouting, interruptions and name-calling isn't what our Founding Fathers had in mind.

Those who attend forums to disrupt should stay outside and allow those with serious concerns to have their questions answered.

CJ's Opinion: Yes. It is abundantly clear that Conservatives are loud-mouthed assholes of the first order. That much is undisputed. The main problem is that Liberals are NOT loud-mouthed assholes. They feel they need to prove how oh-so-civilized they are while Conservatives scream and shout and walk all over them.

Had the Liberal demonstrators in the '60's been half as civilized as Liberals today we'd still be at war in Viet Nam. These Liberal pussies today don't have the necessary passion to get their point across, and their message is being drowned out by the right-wingnut lunatic screamers.

The old cliché 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease' holds true in politics. If you want to be courteous and civilized about it then you will lose. Today's Liberal pussies will lose.

01-14 A True American

2010-01-14T22:21:00.000-06:00

Inhofe: I Am The Planet's #1 Worst Enemy
By Morgan Cohen
January 14, 2010

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) just can't get any respect. Nearly a month ago, he went to the climate change conference in Copenhagen to explain that global warming was a "hoax" conceived by the United Nations and spread by the "Hollywood elite." But the European press would have none of it. A German reporter even told the the cowboy boot-wearing senator that he was "ridiculous." Inhofe suffered his latest indignity at the hands of Rolling Stone, which awarded him the 7th spot on its list of the "planet's worst enemies."

Inhofe took this as a slight. "I should have been number one," he told KFAQ radio in Tulsa, "I guess [Warren] Buffet has a lot more money so he went first."

Inhofe also aired his grievances in an interview with the Tulsa World. "My first response was I should have been number 1, not number 7," he said. "I am serious about that. I have spent now literally years on this thing, and it has been a long, involved thing.''

Reader Comments:
tiowally 6:15 PM
Finally, Inhofe says something that's verifiably true.

rbeats 6:33 PM
His whole rational to not believing in global warming is because of his relationship with God.

You think Pat Robertson is bad? This guys power as a United State Senator, and his staunch literal interpretation of the Bible, will lead to the deaths of millions of people, due to his objections to any real climate change legislation.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/17/inhofe-hoax/

jeffgee 7:00 PM
And he's mighty proud of it

wellstone 7:11 PM
Inhofe is a poster child for the dysfunctional right, unable and unwilling to pull his head out of his ass no matter what.

Inhofe has a lot of supporters among the morons and climate chnage deniers, bu they are a distinct albeit loud minority. My question is how in hell does he manage to keep getting reelected?

How in the world is it possible that the good people of Oklahoma think he represents their values?

tiowally 7:19 PM
I thought he was the poster boy for inbreeding and/or fetal alcohol syndrome.

Marinus van der Lubbe 8:47 PM
Practitioners of incestuous romance probably take umbrage at that remark when confronted by this fuckstick.

bolkonski 9:18 PM
Read the responses in the Tulsa World article referenced above. Inhofe is the sane one, apparently. Then remember that through the rules of the Senate, these people have super majority rule whenever they're told get indigestion by Limbaugh.

Then pray (or mutter...)

Josh 9:39 PM
The good news: He's old. He'll die sooner than later.

Matt Jones 10:08 PM
I hope he lives to 150, to see his state turn into a barren desert because of his kind of idiocy.

CJ's Opinion: Inhofe is the quintessential American: vile, stupid, and vindictive - a True American Patriot.

01-14 America Has the Flu

2010-01-14T11:19:00.001-06:00

Aussie visitor has questions about U.S.
By Dane Quillen, Sydney, Australia
January 14, 2010

I am a resident of Sydney, Australia, and have been visiting family in Chesterton for the holidays. I want to make some comments about some hotly discussed issues in your newspaper.

I mean no offense, but quite frankly I am baffled by a lot of the controversy about national health care, President Obama and former President Bush.

In my country, we have national health care, and I guess I take it for granted -- much as Americans take the military as a government-run agency. I cannot imagine a country as great as the United States having national interests greater than the health and well-being of its citizens. I do not understand the profit motive in health care. I am naive, but is there a profit motive in having a National Guard?

I really am duped by the American lobbyist system. Sounds like Third World bribery to me, but maybe I've been in the outback too long.

We Aussies have high regard for your president, Obama. We are sure his mistakes will be overshadowed by his overall genuine, moral approach to problems.

I do not understand the undercurrent of animosity toward the former administration of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Yes, they made some mistakes, but those mistakes were in reaction to first-time-ever events. I would not want to be faced with the decisions Bush faced. Just how do you fight terrorists? The world is still learning nine years after 9/11.

The thing that confuses me the most is what I guess you call the far-right group. I don't question their right to believe, but I am astounded by their shrieking. They appear to dominate everything in such a negative way.

Well, as they say, when America gets a cold, the rest of the world gets pneumonia. Hope the U.S. gets back on a positive track within, so it can continue to lead the world outside. We really need you.

CJ's Opinion: Somebody once told me that the Aussies were very conservative people, but we Americans make them look like a bunch of ultra-left Liberals with a capital 'L'; yet another indication of just how rotten and self-centered most Americans are. You think we're extremely generous, compassionate and uncorrupted, but compared to the rest of the world we're consumed by greed, indifference and corruption. You make me ashamed to be an American.

01-12 My Personal Embarrassment

2010-01-12T15:14:00.001-06:00

Can Obama Stop the War on Science?
By Paul Waldman
January 12, 2010

For eight years, Republicans politicized science or ignored it. Now, Obama is trying to reverse the damage.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama warmed the hearts of progressives when he promised to change "the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology." And when he got into office, he took a number of steps that demonstrated his sincerity.

He abolished George W. Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research and announced that he was "directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making." His Department of Energy -- run by Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu -- is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exploring innovative new energy sources under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), modeled on the Defense Department's DARPA. Obama also increased spending for the National Science Foundation. And he just announced a $250 million public-private partnership to improve math and science teaching.

All good stuff. But could eight years of an Obama administration undo the damage wrought by eight years of what American Prospect alum Chris Mooney termed "The Republican war on science" that characterized the Bush era? A lot of practical good can be done by the administration in encouraging scientific advancement. But chances are that the next Republican administration will start Bush's war all over again.

One of our two great parties -- and many, if not most, of the people who support it – decided some time ago that science was an enemy, and there's little reason to think it will change its stance any time soon. That doesn't mean that all Republican politicians are equally hostile to science. For instance, one suspects that a Mitt Romney administration would be somewhat less vigorous in its quashing of scientific advancement than a Sarah Palin administration. But as long as the GOP retains its current form, science will remain a political issue, with the partisan lines clearly drawn.

As in so many ways, America is just different from our friends in the industrialized democratic world when it comes to our views about science. The most important reason is that science is politicized here to a degree found in few other places. It's not a recent development -- the politicization of science in America can be traced back at least as far as the Scopes trial in 1925, where the forces of religious faith in that great media event were represented by three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan. But in the latter half of the 20th century, the ideological lines between the Republican and Democratic parties became more clearly drawn. The GOP evolved into the party that opposes secularism and its rational sidekick science, a process hastened by the emergence of the Christian right in the 1980s. Bush simply turned that antipathy into policy with particular zeal.

So few people were surprised when, at an early Republican debate for the 2008 presidential nomination, three candidates – Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and Tom Tancredo – raised their hands when the group was asked who didn't believe in evolution. The irony of it is that among Western democracies, ours is the one with the longest and strongest tradition of separation between church and state, yet also the one where politicians must make the most ostentatious demonstrations of religious belief. In England or Germany or Sweden, a candidate for high office who proclaimed that he didn't believe in evolution would risk being laughed out of the race. Yet when Brownback was asked after that debate whether his views put him outside the mainstream, he replied, "Not in America." And he was right.

You get slightly different results depending on how you phrase it, but no matter how you ask the question, Americans just aren't buying the paradigm that underlies our entire understanding of the biological world. A Gallup poll taken last year found that only 39 percent of respondents "believe in the theory of evolution," while 24 percent said they didn't believe in it, and 36 percent didn't "have an opinion either way." When you give people some wiggle room to get God in there -- by offering them the possibility that evolution occurred, but God was guiding the process -- the number consenting to evolution approaches 50 percent (see here). Interestingly enough, the numbers on this question have been essentially unchanged since Gallup started asking the question in 1982, which, if nothing else, suggests that the "intelligent design" strategy hasn't resulted in any major shift in opinion.

Critically, there is a clear party split: Most Democrats accept evolution, while most Republicans don't. According to a 2008 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Republicans agreed that "God created humans as is within the last 10,000 years" (the number for Democrats was 38 percent). If you believe that, you have to believe the entire scientific community is engaged in a hoax that spans the globe, includes thousands of co-conspirators, and has been going on for decades.

But outside the United States, many more people accept evolution, and the issue isn't political. When a group of researchers led by Jon Miller of Michigan State University looked at opinions in 32 Western countries plus the U.S. and Japan, they found that only Turkey -- 99.8 percent Muslim -- had fewer people who accept evolution than we do. While political ideology had a significant effect on opinions about evolution in America, ideology had zero effect in Europe and Japan. In other words, European conservatives are no more likely to reject evolution than European liberals. "There is no major political party in Europe or Japan," the authors observed, "that uses opposition to evolution as part of its political platform."

Weirdly – for a country where "We're No. 1!" is such an article of faith – most Americans don't realize just how dominant their country is in scientific advancement. Japan might make better robots, and we ceded the creation of globe-destroying black holes to Europe when the Large Hadron Collider went live, but there is little question that the U.S. is the dominant scientific power in the world by any measure. We've produced 239 Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine (the next-highest ranked are Germany with 85 and the U.K. with 80). People come from all over the world to study science in our universities. We invented the lightning rod, the cotton gin, the telegraph, the telephone, air conditioning, the copying machine, the cell phone, the laser, the microchip, the Internet, GPS, and Tivo. Yet when Pew asked Americans how U.S. scientific achievements rated, a paltry 17 percent said they were the best in the world, compared to the 31 percent who said they were average or below average.

Even though there weren't partisan differences on that question, it's clear that many Americans don't quite understand how critical their country's continuing investments in science and technology will be to its future success. So if you're a fan of science and rationality, enjoy the next few years. Barack Obama may have the upper hand against those who imagine that global warming is a hoax and abstinence-only education works, evidence be damned. He is keeping his promise to use the power of the federal government to serve the cause of scientific advancement, but the next Republican to sit in the Oval Office may put the same amount of effort into undermining it.

CJ's Opinion: This doesn't surprise me at all…

A Gallup poll taken last year found that only 39 percent of respondents "believe in the theory of evolution," while 24 percent said they didn't believe in it, and 36 percent didn't "have an opinion either way."

Only 39% of Americans - about two of every five people - have the rudimentary intellect necessary to accept the fundamental scientific concept of evolution as fact; proof positive that Americans are seriously fucking stupid. Clearly, I'm a member of the 39% crowd, but it's still embarrassing to have to admit I'm an American.

01-12 My Personal Shame

2010-01-12T10:43:00.000-06:00

Mexico Suffers 69 Murders In One Day
By Martha Mendoza
January 11, 2010

MEXICO CITY — Mexico opened the new year with what could be its most dubious distinction yet in the 3-year-old battle against drug trafficking – 69 murders in one day.

The country resembled a grim, statistical dart board Saturday as law enforcement and media reported the deaths from various regions, including 26 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, 13 in and around Mexico City and 10 in the northern city of Chihuahua.

More than 6,500 drug-related killings made 2009 the bloodiest year since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels in late 2006 and deployed 45,000 soldiers to fight organized crime, according to death tallies by San Diego's Trans-Border Institute.

Two weeks into 2010, gang bloodshed is becoming more grotesque as drug lords ramp up their attempts at intimidation. Last week a victim's face was peeled from his skull and sewn onto a soccer ball. On Monday, prosecutors in Culiacan identified the remains of 41-year-old former police officer divided into two separate ice chests.

"You wonder how this will end, and it seems impossible," said Daniel Vega, an architect in the northern city of Monterrey. "I doubt Mexico can override drug use, especially since demand for the drugs, as well as all the money and weapons, come from the United States."

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: More results of America's vile and malevolent War on Drugs. Your support for these heinous drug policies makes you personally responsible for mass murder. And for this you are extremely proud of your self-righteous American ideals. You make me ashamed of being an American.

01-11 Wise Up!

2010-01-11T11:48:00.000-06:00

Tax Bank Bonuses and Capital Gains of Wealthy to Pay for Jobs Program
By Robert Creamer
January 11, 2010

Imagine a new, revised version of Moby Dick. In this version, Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of obscene wealth -- rather than his pursuit of the Great White Whale -- has destroyed the ship and left all of the ship's company in danger of drowning. But this time, the ship's crew valiantly salvages a lifeboat and rations -- and rescues Ahab from certain destruction.

Now, in the last chapter, instead of acknowledging that his decisions led the ship to ruin, instead of thanking his crew for saving his life, he demands that he receive a massively disproportionate share of the lifeboat's rations -- hundreds of times that of the average sailor -- which he insists should be his because "he, after all, is the captain -- and the market for captain's rations demands it."

The author of this new version of Moby Dick has proposed two alternative endings to this saga. All present assume the captain is daft, and he is put under the supervision of the ship's dashing young doctor. Or he is simply thrown overboard.

[Snip]

The first priority for Congress must be to get people employed. Every day we wait to employ them, we allow their labor to go to waste.

Much of the cost of creating those jobs could be covered by following the lead of the British and imposing a big tax surcharge on the bonuses paid by the big banks.

Another portion could be paid by raising the income tax rate on capital gains to the same level as ordinary income for all the individuals making more than $250,000 and the couples making more than $500,000. Be clear. I'm not suggesting taxing the pension income or college money of average Americans -- just the capital gains of the wealthiest Americans.

About 70% of all capital gains goes to 3.5% of the population. I'm suggesting that the wealthiest of those pay taxes on capital gains at the same rate that they would if they got the same income by working.

When you think about it, it's absurd that "ordinary income" -- the income generated when you work for a living -- is taxed at up to 35%, and "capital gains" -- income generated when your stocks, bonds, or derivatives appreciate -- is taxed at 15%.

It makes no sense at all that the marginal income of a middle manager who makes $50,000 a year is taxed at 25%, and the income of a wealthy person who spends his time on the French Riviera "day trading" on the stock market is taxed at 15%.

The percentage of income going to the largely unproductive financial sector has skyrocketed in the last two decades. Let's tax that income to put the people who actually produce goods and services back to work.

To those who argue that this would reduce the incentive to come up with "innovative financial products" or clever trading schemes, I say that's exactly the idea: to decrease the incentives our economy provides for the best and brightest to waste their careers gambling on Wall Street instead of doing something productive for our economy.

Ronald Reagan once famously said: "When you tax something you get less of it." Precisely. America needs to tax speculation, and incentivize productive work.

And most importantly, nothing -- including increasing the deficit -- should stand in the way of a crash program to put America back to work. Nothing is more costly to our economy, and our economic future, than the waste of unemployed Americans who are unable to contribute to America's store of wealth.

Read the full article here.

CJ's Opinion: Moby Dick?! Ha! You overestimate American intelligence and underestimate American greed. The rich rule America and nothing and no one is ever going to change that. You think wealthy bankers are going to permit us to raise their taxes?! Get a clue!

01-11 'Superior' Americans Never Learn

2010-01-11T09:03:00.000-06:00

Learning From Europe
By Paul Krugman
January 10, 2010

As health care reform nears the finish line, there is much wailing and rending of garments among conservatives. And I’m not just talking about the tea partiers. Even calmer conservatives have been issuing dire warnings that Obamacare will turn America into a European-style social democracy. And everyone knows that Europe has lost all its economic dynamism.

Strange to say, however, what everyone knows isn’t true. Europe has its economic troubles; who doesn’t? But the story you hear all the time — of a stagnant economy in which high taxes and generous social benefits have undermined incentives, stalling growth and innovation — bears little resemblance to the surprisingly positive facts. The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

Actually, Europe’s economic success should be obvious even without statistics. For those Americans who have visited Paris: did it look poor and backward? What about Frankfurt or London? You should always bear in mind that when the question is which to believe — official economic statistics or your own lying eyes — the eyes have it.

In any case, the statistics confirm what the eyes see.

It’s true that the U.S. economy has grown faster than that of Europe for the past generation. Since 1980 — when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe’s didn’t — America’s real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year. Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 — the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations — has grown only 2.2 percent a year. America rules!

Or maybe not. All this really says is that we’ve had faster population growth. Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.

What about technology? In the late 1990s you could argue that the revolution in information technology was passing Europe by. But Europe has since caught up in many ways. Broadband, in particular, is just about as widespread in Europe as it is in the United States, and it’s much faster and cheaper.

And what about jobs? Here America arguably does better: European unemployment rates are usually substantially higher than the rate here, and the employed fraction of the population lower. But if your vision is of millions of prime-working-age adults sitting idle, living on the dole, think again. In 2008, 80 percent of adults aged 25 to 54 in the E.U. 15 were employed (and 83 percent in France). That’s about the same as in the United States. Europeans are less likely than we are to work when young or old, but is that entirely a bad thing?

And Europeans are quite productive, too: they work fewer hours, but output per hour in France and Germany is close to U.S. levels.

The point isn’t that Europe is utopia. Like the United States, it’s having trouble grappling with the current financial crisis. Like the United States, Europe’s big nations face serious long-run fiscal issues — and like some individual U.S. states, some European countries are teetering on the edge of fiscal crisis. (Sacramento is now the Athens of America — in a bad way.) But taking the longer view, the European economy works; it grows; it’s as dynamic, all in all, as our own.

So why do we get such a different picture from many pundits? Because according to the prevailing economic dogma in this country — and I’m talking here about many Democrats as well as essentially all Republicans — European-style social democracy should be an utter disaster. And people tend to see what they want to see.

After all, while reports of Europe’s economic demise are greatly exaggerated, reports of its high taxes and generous benefits aren’t. Taxes in major European nations range from 36 to 44 percent of G.D.P., compared with 28 in the United States. Universal health care is, well, universal. Social expenditure is vastly higher than it is here.

So if there were anything to the economic assumptions that dominate U.S. public discussion — above all, the belief that even modestly higher taxes on the rich and benefits for the less well off would drastically undermine incentives to work, invest and innovate — Europe would be the stagnant, decaying economy of legend. But it isn’t.

Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they’re down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

CJ's Opinion: See? I told you so. But Americans are too stupid, uncivilized, apathetic and cowardly to get it right. You deserve what you get.

01-11 Meaningless Constitution

2010-01-11T08:52:00.001-06:00

Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution
By Thomas Geoghegan
January 10, 2010

About the Senate, a college professor of mine used to say, “One day, the Supreme Court will declare it unconstitutional.” He was joking, I think.

But the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended.

This change to the Constitution was not the result of, say, a formal amendment, but a procedural rule adopted in 1975: a revision of Senate Rule 22, which was the old cloture rule. Before 1975, it took two-thirds of the Senate to end a filibuster, but it was the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster: if senators wanted to stop a vote, they had to bring in the cots and the coffee and read from Grandma’s recipe for chicken soup until, unshaven, they keeled over from their own rhetorical exhaust.

For the record, nothing like Senate Rule 22 appears in the Constitution, nor was there unlimited debate until Vice President Aaron Burr presided over the Senate in the early 180os. In 1917, after a century of chaos, the Senate put in the old Rule 22 to stop unlimited filibusters. Because it was about stopping real, often distressing, floor debate, one might have been able to defend that rule under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says, “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.”

As revised in 1975, Senate Rule 22 seemed to be an improvement: it required 60 senators, not 67, to stop floor debate. But there also came a significant change in de facto Senate practice: to maintain a filibuster, senators no longer had to keep talking. Nowadays, they don’t even have to start; they just say they will, and that’s enough. Senators need not be on the floor at all. They can be at home watching Jimmy Stewart on cable. Senate Rule 22 now exists to cut off what are ghost filibusters, disembodied debates.

As a result, the supermajority vote no longer deserves any protection under Article I, Section 5 — if it ever did at all. It is instead a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.

Read the full op-ed article here.

CJ's Opinion: The US Constitution is an extremely outdated document that needs at least a major overhaul, if not completely rewritten. However, since it's currently the basis of our nation's system of government (and not completely without merit), then why are we not adhering to its core stipulations?

I don't get you people - you scream at the top of your lungs about defending the principles set forth in the US Constitution, but then totally ignore it when it suits your whims. Typical American hypocrites.

01-10 My Doppelganger?

2010-01-10T13:43:00.000-06:00

The Twisted and Dangerous Republican Record on Terrorism
By Bob Cesca
January 6, 2010

The Republican record on terrorism is pretty damn terrible. Naturally, this hasn't stopped them from milking whatever remains of their purely cosmetic tough-guy reputation in order to fear-monger the failed Underpants Bomber incident irrespective of their lengthy history of failure, cowardice and stupidity on the issue.

I think we all understand and begrudgingly accept that Americans have a short attention span, and an even shorter memory, but the Republicans are really counting on it as they exploit the post-underpants freakout.

CJ's Opinion: Let's see here. We've got "pretty damn terrible" Repubs, we've got "failure, cowardice and stupidity", we've got stupid Americans having "a short attention span, and an even shorter memory"… I think that about covers it. This guy could be me!

01-10 Shady Republican Tactics

2010-01-10T10:12:00.000-06:00

From an op-ed column by Paul Krugman last month:

Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

CJ's Opinion: Republicans could have prevented all this madness and helped to shape a much better healthcare bill by participating in the legislative process instead of unanimously opposing it every step of the way. Their intransigent, lock-step opposition to any form of healthcare reform effort, combined with this non-constitutional filibuster procedure, has given a few unscrupulous senators the power to weaken and manipulate the healthcare bill to their advantage.

If the Republican goal was to prevent the public option and squander American resources by pouring money into the pockets of greedy insurance companies, while still being able to deny that this was their intention all along, then they have succeeded brilliantly. Job well done! Assholes!

01-10 Real Americans Don't Pay Taxes

2010-01-10T08:03:00.000-06:00

Eventually, Obama has to raise taxes, as Reagan did
By Cynthia Tucker
January 8, 2010

The cult of Ronald Reagan is alive and well in Republican precincts across the land, from the nation’s capitol to outposts in Georgia, Montana and Missouri. But the faith of the followers has distorted Reagan’s legacy. The Reagan whom his acolytes worship is a shallow hardliner who doesn’t bear much resemblance to the pragmatic and flexible man who occupied the White House for most of the ’80s.

If you asked the legions of Reagan standard-bearers about his opposition to taxes, for example, they’d reply that he never sanctioned a tax increase. That idea has taken such hold in the GOP that no Republican politician dares mutter “tax hike” except as an expletive.

Over the coming months, as President Obama takes up the task of deficit reduction, you’ll hear that conservative article of faith preached from the Senate floor, on the airwaves favored by conservative talk show hosts, in the policy papers cranked out by conservative think tanks. There’s just a tiny problem of fact: Reagan did, too, raise taxes.

Staring at a sea of red ink, a Democratic Congress passed a bill in 1982 that raised taxes by $37.5 billion a year. Reagan could have vetoed the legislation, but he chose to sign it. (He also signed legislation increasing the Social Security tax, which put the program on sound fiscal footing.)

Most economists agree that raising taxes during harsh economic times is a bad idea, so it’s unlikely that President Obama will propose a tax hike in this calendar year. (Besides, Democrats, already spooked by their prospects in mid-term elections, wouldn’t support one, anyway.) But as the year goes on, Obama and his aides will have to come forward with serious proposals to bring government spending in line with revenues. Tax increases will have to be part of the mix.

If Congress were a more rational body, with appropriate respect for actual data and the historical record, we’d hear no more about tax cuts as the balm for every wound. The last decade — the “Lost Decade” — provided a living experiment with tax cuts as economic policy, since George W. Bush passed three massive ones.

How’d that work out? The nation saw zero — zero — net job growth over the last ten years. Middle-class wages stagnated.

What the nation got out of the bargain was a massive budget deficit. As much rhetorical fire as Republicans have aimed at the Obama administration, he inherited most of the budget mess. And the only way out of it will be to raise taxes, starting with the most affluent Americans.

No, it won’t be possible to cut government programs and services enough to balance the budget. Most federal funds go to military spending and to Social Security and Medicare, not to welfare programs or foreign aid or other projects that might be easily tossed aside — politically speaking.

A tiny handful of brave and thoughtful conservatives — enough to hold a convention in a Mini-Cooper — are trying to wrench their party away from the cult of a no-new-taxes Reagan. The leader of this hardy band is Bruce Bartlett, who actually worked for Reagan as a domestic policy adviser. In a book published last year — The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward — he calls for hefty tax increases.

Though he doesn’t go that far, Ross Douthat, a conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times, has also warned the GOP about the cult of Reaganomics. Douthat wrote recently:

“In the unhappy aughts, we witnessed the exhaustion of Reaganomics. A quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s mix of tax cuts and deregulation revived American competitiveness, George W. Bush’s attempt to imitate the Gipper produced only wage stagnation and skyrocketing debt.”

Perhaps that’s heresy, but it has a certain ring of truth.

CJ's Opinion: Are you insane?! You expect Americans to actually pay their bills? Puh-leeze!

What we truly need are more tax cuts for millionaires (and billionaires) so they can hire more minimum wage peasants to slave for them and make them even wealthier. Duh! Every patriotic American knows that! Please try to keep up.

01-10 Christian Forgiveness

2010-01-10T07:42:00.000-06:00

Are They Really?
The New York Times Editorial
January 9, 2010

What’s with the apologies? Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein caught his fellow titans by surprise in November, admitting that “we participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” That came less than two weeks after he infuriated pretty much everyone else by declaring that Goldman was “doing God’s work.”

He was not the only banker indulging in the contrition thing. (In March, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, who presided over the bungled acquisition of Merrill Lynch, issued his own apology and was still pushed out.) Now the former Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin, who is not even a banker, has plunged into the zeitgeist.

Mr. Levin issued a belated — by a decade — mea culpa for buying AOL and urged others to follow his lead. “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently,” Mr. Levin said. “I guess it’s time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say: You know what, I’m solely responsible for it.”

Wall Street has a lot to apologize for, but contrition would be more convincing if it came with accountability: a resignation or a decision to forswear bonuses and certainly a pledge to stop trying to block desperately needed financial reforms.

Americans come as well equipped to apologize as anybody. Five minutes on the neighborhood playground will confirm that parents still try their best to instill in their children the merits of saying “I’m sorry.”

True contrition is a rare thing in the American corner office, probably because when children become corporate executives they have lawyers who patiently explain how such good manners could get them in trouble in the land of legal liability. In bankers, this is compounded by a sense that they are truly doing God’s work — not merely gambling with taxpayers’ money.

At play here, we suspect, are both tactics and a sense of history. Legend has it that during the reign of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette responded to her hungry subjects’ demand for bread by declaring, “Let them eat cake.” In hindsight, an apology might have been a better idea. Mr. Blankfein still has his job.

CJ's Opinion: Christianity: commit the most egregious acts on Saturday, tell god you're sorry on Sunday, go to heaven on Monday. Even the most brutal acts of aggression can be forgiven with the proper acts of contrition. If the perpetrator can feign the appropriate level of sincerity, you morons will fall for it every time.

Wall Street bankers aren't stupid - they know how extremely gullible Americans can be with their ignorant Christian belief system. You're so fucking stupid - you deserve to be fleeced by rich bankers. Morons.

01-09 America's Primary Exports: Violence, Death, and Misery

2010-01-09T20:46:00.001-06:00

Christmas, Drug Wars and Juarez
By Jeff Antebi
January 9, 2010

When I mentioned I was going to spend Christmas photographing Juárez, people reacted as if I was planning a trip to Somalia.

They were not that far off.

How out of control is the city of Juárez? Compare the killings there to the war in Afghanistan. In Juárez in 2009 -- a single city with only 1.5 million people--almost 2,600 people have been murdered. The number of civilians killed in the war in Afghanistan in 2009 was about 2,038 in a nation of 28 million people.

In the last two years, upwards of 4,000 people have been murdered in Juárez, compared to about 30 homicides across the U.S. border in El Paso.

Juárez is the deadliest city in the world for a simple reason: for years, several powerful drug cartels have been fighting over control of the city. The region represents an extremely profitable route into the U.S., where consumers spend enormous sums of money to get high.

On average, 10 people are murdered each day. In September alone, 476 people were killed, most of them gunned down in the street in broad daylight.

Juárez has become synonymous with murder, but the murders here are extraordinary brutal. The killings often involve extreme sadism, mass executions, decapitations and torture. From the simple (cigarette burns, bones crushed to pieces) to the macabre (being buried alive) to the unpredictable. In two instances in September, narco mafiosos burst into drug rehab clinics, lined people up against the wall, shot 28 dead, most execution style.

[snip]

I went to a lot of murder scenes over the course of 72 hours. All involved execution style killings.

One young man was shot dead in his car, a big bullet hole in the side of his belly. His father was held back by other family members, screaming that it was a mistaken identity, his son was not involved with the narcos.

[snip]

Once I passed a speeding ambulance leaving as I neared a scene. Although I first thought there were two dead victims, it turned out one was alive and being rushed to the hospital. He had been severely stabbed and had apparently faked his death to his killers. The other guy was not so lucky, discovered in the trunk of a car, hands bound with yellow straps, his face smashed into a swollen bloody mess of red. It looked like his pants had been removed.

Rushing from one scene to the next, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, it was easy to forget the much wider, and more devastating, impact of all this killing. For the most part, I observed lifeless bodies, people who themselves were probably killers, as cartel-on-cartel murders are the most common.

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: Make no mistake - this is America's drug war. There would be very little profit to be made - and no reason for these killings - were it not for America's monstrous War on Drugs. And the funny thing is that American's are PROUD of this activity. The vast majority of Americans fully support this unspeakable violence with a drug war that does absolutely nothing to mitigate America's drug problems, and in fact drastically worsens the problem.

And then you wonder why the rest of the world hates Americans. Well here's a clue: you are self-centered, self-indulgent, clueless, uncaring, evil fucking pricks. Duh.

01-09 Rotten Hoosier Racism

2010-01-09T07:03:00.000-06:00

Transportation funding scheme is unfair, racially discriminatory
Chicago Sun-Times Letter to the Editor
January 9, 2010

Twenty-six years ago, a bloc of legislators working with Gov. Jim Thompson to undermine Chicago's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, forced a law through the Legis- lature in Springfield, just minutes before the midnight deadline, dictating the means by which public transportation in Illinois would be funded.

This week, Chicago Transit Authority riders filed a class-action lawsuit charging that that funding scheme has favored Metra (70 percent white ridership) at the expense of the CTA (60 percent minority ridership), in violation of state and federal civil rights laws.

The plaintiffs say the State of Illinois, the Regional Transportation Authority, Metra and the Illinois Department of Transportation have knowingly distributed a disproportionately high amount of capital and operating funding to Metra, while depriving the CTA of its fair share. In 2008, this funding scheme was re-enacted.

Without adequate funding, the CTA has been unable to extend rail service to the mainly minority riders on the South and West sides. These riders depend upon bus routes that have been slashed dramatically or eliminated altogether since the 1983 law was enacted.

This system has, for too long, made day-to-day travel -- to work, to school, to commercial centers --unduly difficult or even impossible for residents of mainly African-American and Latino parts of Chicago, which the CTA simply cannot afford to fully serve.

Service reductions and fare hikes cripple employment opportunities and isolate residents on the South and West sides.

This funding scheme comes from a history of systemic racism that perpetuates barriers to social and economic equity in the region.

The class-action suit is correct. The funding scheme for transit in Illinois is both unfair and racially discriminatory.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

We must redesign our city as one in which no neighborhood is isolated. Fair access to public transportation ensures that all residents, black, brown or white, rich or poor, are never bound by the limitations of the immediate surroundings.

Fair access to public transportation also guarantees all Chicagoans access to every outlet and opportunity this great city has to offer.

We must make certain that Illinois is a state that truly exemplifies the principles of equity and justice in its public institutions. We can start now. Let's take this lawsuit as our cue.

Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.)

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.)

Ald. Rick Munoz (22nd Ward)

CJ's Opinion: You think you've got it bad? Here in Northwest Indiana we don't have any regional public transportation whatsoever. We have a hodgepodge of substandard bus systems that severely hinder our ability to travel beyond our local borders.

Regional bus systems would be much more efficient and serve our population much better, but apparently these Conservative Hoosier racists want to keep the minority populations isolated (read segregated) and keep them out of their lily-white communities. These god-fearing, Conservative Hoosiers are some rotten fucking people. Perhaps their rotten fucking god will forgive them but I won't!

01-09 Inferior Socialist Healthcare

2010-01-09T06:24:00.000-06:00

Heart operation using MRI is world first
BBC News
9 January, 2010

A British six-year-old boy has become the first person in the world to have a heart valve widened using an MRI scan for guidance rather than X-ray imaging.

Jack Walborn was born with the heart condition pulmonary valve stenosis, which reduces blood flow to the lungs.

Using MRI means patients are not exposed to radiation - particularly important for children.

The scan also provides a clearer image, and information about the body's tissues, in real time during surgery.

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: Yet another example of the inferiority of Britain's socialized healthcare system. Nothing to see here - move along.

01-08 Conservative Values

2010-01-08T12:33:00.000-06:00

Why is Fox News Leaving Geithner Alone?
By Cenk Uygur
January 8, 2010

Quick question. Why hasn't conservative media ripped Tim Geithner's face off yet? He is by far the most incompetent and compromised (nicer than corrupt) member of the Obama administration. There is a mountain of evidence that he has helped his banker friends at the expense of American taxpayers over and over again. He is the Treasury Secretary when the main issue in the country is the state of our economy. And Republicans in Congress are now going after him. So, why is Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. keeping their powder dry?

This is weird. If it was anyone else that had screwed up one tenth of what Geithner has, it would be running on a 24/7 loop on Fox News. Geithner gave away over $62 billion to the top banks in the country in secret, tried to cover it up and at the very least overpaid these banks by $13 billion. And that's just the latest in a series of scandals, with all the same theme -- Geithner gives away taxpayer money to the richest (and most culpable) guys in the country. Ah, there it is.

If the right-wing goes after Geithner, then they're going after the banks and the billions in taxpayer money they received. The right-wing media in this country have no interest in attacking big money, big corporations or big banks. So, while they'll talk for ten straight days about how Janet Napolitano should be fired for misspeaking, Geithner is remarkably bullet-proof. Why? Because they actually love what he's doing.

CJ's Opinion: Conservatives are never satisfied - they always want more and will do anything to get it. Things like ethics, morals, laws, and patriotism are not important when money is involved. Conservatives value money above all else - they would kill their own mothers for a nickel.

01-07 Smart People

2010-01-07T09:29:00.000-06:00

The Happiest People
By Nicholas D. Kristof
January 6, 2010

Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.

There are several ways of measuring happiness in countries, all inexact, but this pearl of Central America does stunningly well by whatever system is used. For example, the World Database of Happiness, compiled by a Dutch sociologist on the basis of answers to surveys by Gallup and others, lists Costa Rica in the top spot out of 148 nations.

That’s because Costa Ricans, asked to rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale, average 8.5. Denmark is next at 8.3, the United States ranks 20th at 7.4 and Togo and Tanzania bring up the caboose at 2.6.

Scholars also calculate happiness by determining “happy life years.” This figure results from merging average self-reported happiness, as above, with life expectancy. Using this system, Costa Rica again easily tops the list. The United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last.

A third approach is the “happy planet index,” devised by the New Economics Foundation, a liberal think tank. This combines happiness and longevity but adjusts for environmental impact — such as the carbon that countries spew.

Here again, Costa Rica wins the day, for achieving contentment and longevity in an environmentally sustainable way. The Dominican Republic ranks second, the United States 114th (because of its huge ecological footprint) and Zimbabwe is last.

Maybe Costa Rican contentment has something to do with the chance to explore dazzling beaches on both sides of the country, when one isn’t admiring the sloths in the jungle (sloths truly are slothful, I discovered; they are the tortoises of the trees). Costa Rica has done an unusually good job preserving nature, and it’s surely easier to be happy while basking in sunshine and greenery than while shivering up north and suffering “nature deficit disorder.”

After dragging my 12-year-old daughter through Honduran slums and Nicaraguan villages on this trip, she was delighted to see a Costa Rican beach and stroll through a national park. Among her favorite animals now: iguanas and sloths.

(Note to boss: Maybe we should have a columnist based in Costa Rica?)

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

Rising education levels also led the country to preserve its lush environment as an economic asset. Costa Rica is an ecological pioneer, introducing a carbon tax in 1997. The Environmental Performance Index, a collaboration of Yale and Columbia Universities, ranks Costa Rica at No. 5 in the world, the best outside Europe.

This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.

Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital — but then again, Mexicans sometimes slip into the United States, presumably in pursuit of both happiness and assets.

Cross-country comparisons of happiness are controversial and uncertain. But what does seem quite clear is that Costa Rica’s national decision to invest in education rather than arms has paid rich dividends. Maybe the lesson for the United States is that we should devote fewer resources to shoring up foreign armies and more to bolstering schools both at home and abroad.

In the meantime, I encourage you to conduct your own research in Costa Rica, exploring those magnificent beaches or admiring those slothful sloths. It’ll surely make you happy.

CJ's Opinion: Hmmm. Americans prefer a powerful military to education and happiness. Consequently, American society is inferior to that of the Costa Ricans. Stupid, pathetic Americans! Doesn't matter, I guess - morons are incapable of learning.

01-07 No Need to Hurry

2010-01-07T07:46:00.000-06:00

Doubt global warming? The planet won't tell a lie
By Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young
January 7, 2010

A recent Rasmussen poll suggests that an alarming number of Americans believe scientists have falsified their data to sell global warming to the public. Add this to some embarrassing comments made in the e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in England, and it has been a long, hot autumn for climate scientists.

Why is there so much confusion about whether the planet is warming? We believe a big part of the problem centers on the use of earth surface temperature data as a direct measure of warming. Where do you stick the thermometer? What matters most: Daytime highs? Nighttime lows? Summer or winter temperatures? Trying to determine whether the planet is warming in this fashion seems fraught with peril.

One doesn't need to measure thousands of temperatures to find conclusive evidence that the planet is warming. The earth does the averaging for us. Many physical and biological characteristics show that the earth is warming and has been for decades.
Clear evidence

Studies from both hemispheres indicate that 95% of the world's alpine glaciers, excluding Antarctica, are retreating. Glacier National Park in Montana is down to 26 named glaciers from 150 in 1850, and if this trend continues, the park is expected to be ice-free by 2020. Glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking so rapidly that the summer flow of the major rivers (Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtze) they feed might eventually be affected.

Permafrost regions are thawing in high northern latitudes, causing buildings to sink and roads to crumble. Melting permafrost is the reason Arctic shorelines are retreating, forcing the relocation of Inupiat Eskimo villages along the shore.

The great ice sheets are all retreating. The Greenland ice sheet melting began to accelerate in the 1990s, and the margin of the entire ice mass is melting even in its northernmost reaches.The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun extensive melting, mostly since 2000. More recently, the first indication that the larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet was melting and contributing to the sea level rise was reported last month in Nature Geoscience.
Sea level rising

The rate of rise in sea level has sped up over the past century. A tide gauge on a pier in Duck, N.C., says the sea level is rising at 1.5 feet a century. The Arctic Ocean's ice cover is shrinking and could disappear, endangering animals that depend on the ice for their survival.

One can argue for hours whether this year was warmer or colder than last. To us, it doesn't matter. We should be reading the earth, not thermometers. The earth is clearly warming, and sea level is clearly rising.

In order to convince a skeptical public that global change is real, scientists and funding agencies need to invest more in field measurements and monitoring rather than computer modeled predictions.

As for the skeptics, it's time to get off the atmospheric temperature kick and read the earth. We also believe the science clearly indicates that humans are playing a new, and critical role in driving that warming. But, lack of clarity in the exact degree that humans are causing global warming should not be used as an excuse to ignore the monumental changes that rising sea level and changing climate will bring to the planet, and our society.

Orrin H. Pilkey is professor emeritus at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. Rob Young is director of Western Carolina University's Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.

CJ's Opinion: You're wasting your breath (or words) - Americans are too stupid to understand the situation. They won't accept the glaring reality until it's too late to do anything to stop it. But that's OK - take as long as you want. I'll be long gone - you people have fun with it. Stupid people deserve what they get.

01-06 Why Bother?

2010-01-06T05:57:00.000-06:00

Blah-g
By Steven Weber
January 5, 2010

Sorry, I've just lost the will to blog.

Maybe it happened New Year's Day when I found a piece of confetti in my stool.

Or maybe it was brewing sometime before that epic event, when the realization that, in our country as we now experience it, the febrile intoxication of hope and change has reaped the cold despair of thwarted expectation and bitter frustration.

Happy new year!

Government has finally revealed itself to be professional wrestling for ugly people in business suits (except for that hunky John Thune. Wouldn't he and Sarah Palin throw some good looking calves? I see a future first couple!). It's very exciting but staged to within an inch of its approximation of life: lots of rivalries and fouls with occasional moments of authentic drama, but at the end of the day the outcome seems lamely predetermined.

Did we really think the young man from Chicago would actually change the way the game is played, merely by being inspiring, articulate, highly educated, benevolently ambitious and a vaccination against every diseased policy the previous administration and its grassroots apparatchiks spewed forth?

I belch a resounding "yes."

But the game, it seems, is bigger than him, bigger than all of The People.

Because it uses The People. It uses them as fuel and as fodder; it bleeds the hope from them and substitutes it with fear; it is run by tyrants steeped in a tradition of oppression. Only they don't oppress with the immediate application of armies and gulags and stormtroopers. They oppress gradually, slowly, steadily...with sugar. They suppress with intoxicants. They dazzle the eye with semblances of old pride and faded glory, both too diluted to have any practical effect upon a sated and dispirited population.

They have successfully bamboozled The People into having faith in a system which is incapable of reciprocation.

And so my president, for whom I have the utmost respect, is the most visible of dupes. Hell, given his savvy, he probably even knows he and his country have been rendered incontrovertibly, tragically superfluous.

Yeah, it's easy to lose the will to blog when the game's in the bag.

CJ's Opinion: The US system of government "uses The People. It uses them as fuel and as fodder; it bleeds the hope from them and substitutes it with fear; it is run by tyrants steeped in a tradition of oppression." This is true of The People in general - for The People who care too much it is especially tragic. Our hopes for the future are first raised beyond reason and then brutally dashed against the rocks; we are utterly devastated.

The wealthy ruling class runs the show and there is nothing that We The People can do to change the outcome. Struggling to affect meaningful change - hoping to make America and the world a better place to live for All The People - is an exercise in futility. Why bother even trying?

A great many people simply give up; most never cared in the first place. Those who are fortunate enough to have achieved 'The Great American Dream' (members of the 'Haves' crowd) are perfectly content with the status quo; the system has served them well and they don't want anything to change. The wealthy, of course, always demand a greater share of the pie, and they usually get what they want. The vast majority are blissfully ignorant or simply too stupid to understand the dire nature of the situation; they live out their pointless little lives without a clue of reality, brainwashed into believing that America is the 'Greatest Nation on Earth.' A few have the courage and the fortitude to continue the struggle against all odds, hoping to beg a few crumbs from the greedy hands of our wealthy overlords. Some, like me, get depressed, angry and bitter.

Did I omit anyone? To which group do you belong?

01-05 Bend Over and Take It

2010-01-05T05:27:00.001-06:00

An Uneasy Feeling
By Bob Herbert
January 4, 2010

I’m starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation’s grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues — the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga — while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift.

Staggering numbers of Americans are still unemployed and nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it.

As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, the entire past decade “was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times.” There was no net job creation — none — between December 1999 and now. None!

The Post article read like a lament, a longing for the U.S. as we’d once known it: “No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent.”

Middle-class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. The data for 2009 are not yet in, but you can just imagine what happened to those families in that nightmarish downturn. Small children over the holidays were asking Santa Claus to bring mommy or daddy a job.

One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans, according to an article in The Times on Sunday, have said that food stamps were their only income.

This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing. For example, an end to the mantra of monthly job losses would undoubtedly be welcomed. But even if the economy manages to create a few hundred thousand new jobs a month, it would do little to haul us from the unemployment pit dug for us by the Great Recession. We need to create more than 10 million new jobs just to get us back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007.

What’s needed are big new innovative efforts to fashion an economy that creates jobs for all who want and need to work. Just getting us back in fits and starts over the next few years to where we were when the recession began should not be acceptable to anyone. We should be moving now to invest aggressively in a new, greener economy, leading the world in the development of alternative fuels, advanced transportation networks and the effort to restrain the poisoning of the planet. We should be developing an industrial policy that emphasizes the need for America to regain its manufacturing mojo, as tough as that might seem, and we need to rebuild our infrastructure.

We’re not smart as a nation. We don’t learn from the past, and we don’t plan for the future. We’ve spent a year turning ourselves inside out with arguments of every sort over health care reform only to come up with a bloated, Rube Goldberg legislative mess that protects the insurance and drug industries and does not rein in runaway health care costs.

The politicians will be back soon, trust me, screaming about the need to rein in health costs.

We keep talking about how essential it is to radically improve public education while, at the same time, we’re closing libraries and firing teachers by the tens of thousands for economic reasons.

The fault lies everywhere. The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame. Shared sacrifice is not part of anyone’s program. Politicians can’t seem to tell the difference between wasteful spending and investments in a more sustainable future. Any talk of raising taxes is considered blasphemous, but there is a constant din of empty yapping about controlling budget deficits.

Oh, yes, and we’re fighting two wars.

If America can’t change, then the current state of decline is bound to continue. You can’t have a healthy economy with so many millions of people out of work, and there is no plan now that would result in the creation of millions of new jobs any time soon.

Voters were primed at the beginning of the Obama administration for fundamental changes that would have altered the trajectory of American life for the better. Politicians of all stripes, many of them catering to the nation’s moneyed interests, fouled that up to a fare-thee-well.

Now we’re escalating in Afghanistan, falling back into panic mode over an attempted act of terror and squandering a golden opportunity to build a better society.

CJ's Opinion: If you're not part of the wealthy ruling class in America then you're just fucked. Our system of government is broken beyond repair and there is no hope for meaningful change.

European people don't tolerate this type of abuse - they take action, they rise up and riot in the streets, they demand change and they get it. You stupid Americans bend over and take it up the ass every time - you deserve what you get.

01-05 Thy Will Be Done

2010-01-05T05:07:00.000-06:00

Hate Begets Hate
The New York Times Editorial
January 4, 2010

Uganda’s government, which has a shameful record of discrimination against gay men and lesbians, is now considering legislation that would impose the death sentence for homosexual behavior. The United States and others need to make clear to the Ugandan government that such barbarism is intolerable and will make it an international pariah.

Corruption and repression — including violence against women and children and abuse of prisoners — are rife in Uganda. According to The Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman, officially sanctioned homophobia is particularly acute. Gay Ugandans are tormented with beatings, blackmail, death threats and what has been described as “correctional rape.”

The government’s venom is chilling: “Homosexuals can forget about human rights,” James Nsaba Buturo, who holds the cynically titled position of minister of ethics and integrity, said recently.

What makes this even worse is that three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” gays and lesbians have been widely discredited in the United States, helped feed this hatred. Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer gave a series of talks in Uganda last March to thousands of police officers, teachers and politicians in which, according to participants and audio recordings, they claimed that gays and lesbians are a threat to Bible-based family values.

Now the three Americans are saying they had no intention of provoking the anger that, just one month later, led to the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. You can’t preach hate and not accept responsibility for the way that hate is manifested.

We don’t have much hope that they will atone for their acts. But right now the American government, and others, should make clear to Uganda that if this legislation becomes law, it will lose millions of dollars in foreign aid and be shunned globally.

CJ's Opinion: Self-righteous religious zealots do not "atone for their acts" when carrying out god's work. Their god is omnipotent; torturing and killing homosexual people is god's will.

01-04 Mass Transit for the Wealthy

2010-01-04T18:13:00.000-06:00

US Spends Ten Times More On Afghanistan Than Airport Security
By Sam Stein
January 4, 2010

The botched Christmas airliner attack, followed by a steady stream of alarming reports about the vulnerability of airports, has prompted questions about the budgetary priorities that underline U.S. national security.

First and foremost is a fairly straightforward query: why is the U.S. spending so heavily in Afghanistan and Iraq, when a terrorist who nearly blew up an aircraft over Detroit journeyed from Nigeria to London to Yemen, all the while apparently being managed by al Qaeda in Pakistan?

The numbers indeed are sobering. In fiscal year 2009, the Transportation Security Administration was allocated $7.99 billion, $5.74 billion of which was earmarked for aviation security. Only $128 million of that total was geared towards "enhancements at passenger checkpoints to improve the detection of prohibited items, especially weapons and explosives" which is roughly $100 million less than the tax break granted to Alaska fishermen in the stimulus package passed early this Congress.

Read the full article here.

CJ's Opinion: The US subsidizes mass transit systems for the wealthy by providing $5.74 billion for aviation security. We are all being forced to subsidize a prohibitively expensive mode of transportation so a minority of comparatively wealthy people can tool around in jet airplanes. Clearly, this form of mass transit is far from being 'cost effective' or this wealthy jet-set crowd could pay for their own security. Yet these Conservative Pigs still aren't satisfied and are demanding we pay even more.

But suggest that we subsidize mass transit bus systems for poor people so we can get to medical facilities, supportive services, jobs, and shopping centers and suddenly mass transit isn't 'cost effective' and not worth funding. These self-centered, Conservative Pigs make me sick to my stomach! Have you no shame whatsoever? How can you live with yourselves?!

01-04 Dr. Watson

2010-01-04T14:41:00.000-06:00

Reducing America's Economic Polarization Will Lead to Political Comity
By Robert Creamer
January 4, 2010

We frequently hear pundits pontificating about the rising level of political polarization in Congress.

Often the blame is ascribed to plummeting levels of civility among Members. In fact, ten years ago the House actually conducted several "civility retreats" aimed at fostering a more civil atmosphere inside the body. These events featured motivational speakers and smaller "encounter-group-like" seminars - and were widely attended by Members and their families. Needless to say, this approach didn't do much for the actual "civility index" in Congress.

And then there are the "centrists" who think that the partisan divide can best be bridged by proposals that seek to "moderate" the Democratic "change" agenda. Of course, most of these "moderates" want to water down Democratic proposals to change the status quo -- proposals that would reduce the power of the Wall Street gang, the private insurance industry, the energy companies and Chamber of Commerce. This presents a serious problem to most Democrats because the interests of these special interests are generally diametrically opposed to the interests of the American people. But it turns out they are also counterproductive when it comes to ending political polarization as well. Here's why:

Several years ago, a group of political scientists that included Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, conducted an important study on the causes of political polarization. Their results were published in a fascinating book, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Their study found that there is a direct relationship between economic inequality and polarization in American politics.

The team measured political polarization in congressional votes over the last century, and found a direct correlation with the percentage of income received by the top 1% of the electorate.

They also compared the Gini Index of Income Inequality with congressional vote polarization of the last half-century and found a comparable relationship.

Why should this be? It doesn't take a political genius to figure out that if people have more in common they are more likely to support similar proposals and perspectives. Political polarization in Congress does not result from some new inability to "communicate" or "empathize." It results from the fact that the major constituencies of the two parties have increasingly divergent economic interests.

To put it simply, Republicans increasingly represent the interests of the wealthiest elements of American society, and Democrats represent everyone else. As the gap between the incomes of these segments of the population grows, so does the gap between their economic interests and the policy proposals they support.

So in other words, if you want to do something about the political polarization of Congress, you have to deal with the underlying cause. You have to reduce the growing level of income inequality in America. Unfortunately, when "Moderate" Democrats attempt to defang Democratic proposals to rein in private insurance companies, Wall Street banks, energy companies, and the Chamber of Commerce they have exactly the opposite effect. The actions of these "Moderates" serve to perpetuate income inequality - and as a direct consequence, the political polarization they are so quick to attack.

We should remember that the level of income inequality is far from being a static feature of American society.

Paul Krugman points out that at the beginning of the Great Depression, income inequality, and inequality in the control of wealth, was very high. Then came the "the great compression" between 1929 and 1947. Real wages for workers in manufacturing rose 67% while real income for the richest 1% of Americans fell 17%. This period marked the birth of the American middle class. Two major forces drove these trends - unionization of major manufacturing sectors, and the public policies of the New Deal that were sparked by the Great Depression.

The growing spending power of everyday Americans spurred the postwar boom from 1947 to 1973. Real wages rose 81% and the income of the richest 1% rose 38%. Growth was widely shared, but income inequality continued to drop.

From 1973 to 1980, everyone lost ground. Real wages fell 3% and income for the richest 1% fell 4%. The oil shocks, and the dramatic slowdown in economic growth in developing nations, took their toll on America's and the world's economies.

Then came what economist Paul Krugman calls "the New Gilded Age." Beginning in 1980, there were big gains at the very top. The tax policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations magnified income redistribution.

In the last 20 years, there has been a massive re-polarization of incomes in America between the wealthiest 1% of the population and everyone else. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that fully two-thirds of all income gains during the last economic expansion (2002 to 2007) flowed to the top 1% of the population. And that, in turn, is one of the chief reasons why the median income for ordinary Americans actually dropped by $2,197 per year since 2000.

From 1990 to 2004, the income of the top 1% of the population has increased 57%. The richest Americans - the top one-tenth of 1% - have experienced income growth of 85%. Yet the median income of the bottom 90% has increased only 2%.

Now the CEO of the average company in the Standard and Poor's Index makes10.9 million. That means that before lunch, on the first workday of the year, he (sometimes she) has made more than the minimum wage workers in his company will make all year. That translates to5,240 per hour - or about 344 times that pay of the typical American worker.
Most people would consider a salary of100,000 per year reasonably good pay. But the average CEO makes that much in the first 20 hours of the work year.
And that's nothing compared to some of the Kings of Wall Street. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged588 million in compensation each- more than 19,000 times as much as the average U.S. worker. And by the way, the hedge fund managers paid a tax rate on their income of only 15% -- far lower than the rate paid by their secretaries.

So if all the "moderates" who say they want to help end the polarization of Congress are serious, they need to get to work supporting the Democratic agenda to end the stranglehold of the wealthiest, most powerful economic interests, and support measures to once again increase taxes on the wealthiest among us at least to the levels they were back in the Clinton Administration. In other words, if you want to end the polarization of Congress, you have to end the economic polarization of America.

CJ's Opinion: No shit, Sherlock. How do you propose we end economic polarization when the wealthy ruling class owns the politicians and the middle classes are too stupid to understand they're being fleeced in the name of Capitalism? For the umpteenth time, the bankers own America and there is nothing that can be done to stop them. Your desire for economic parity is pure fantasy - you're just too thick to figure it out.

01-04 Wholesome Christian Values

2010-01-04T06:00:00.000-06:00

After Americans Visit, Uganda Weighs Death for Gays
By Jeffrey Gettleman
January 3, 2010

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”

The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over.

Instead, Uganda seems to have become a far-flung front line in the American culture wars, with American groups on both sides, the Christian right and gay activists, pouring in support and money as they get involved in the broader debate over homosexuality in Africa.

“It’s a fight for their lives,” said Mai Kiang, a director at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York-based group that has channeled nearly $75,000 to Ugandan gay rights activists and expects that amount to grow.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

“I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

Mr. Lively and Mr. Brundidge have made similar remarks in interviews or statements issued by their organizations. But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.

“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V., but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ”

Despite such attacks, many gay men and lesbians here said things had been getting better for them before the bill, at least enough to hold news conferences and publicly advocate for their rights. Now they worry that the bill could encourage lynchings. Already, mobs beat people to death for infractions as minor as stealing shoes.

“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.

Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”

“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”

Uganda is an exceptionally lush, mostly rural country where conservative Christian groups wield enormous influence. This is, after all, the land of proposed virginity scholarships, songs about Jesus playing in the airport, “Uganda is Blessed” bumper stickers on Parliament office doors and a suggestion by the president’s wife that a virginity census could be a way to fight AIDS.

During the Bush administration, American officials praised Uganda’s family-values policies and steered millions of dollars into abstinence programs.

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men can face death by stoning. Beyond Africa, a handful of Muslim countries, like Iran and Yemen, also have the death penalty for homosexuals. But many Ugandans said they thought that was going too far. A few even spoke out in support of gay people.

“I can defend them,” said Haj Medih, a Muslim taxi driver with many homosexual customers. “But I fear the what? The police, the government. They can arrest you and put you in the safe house, and for me, I don’t have any lawyer who can help me.”

CJ's Opinion: American Christians routinely condemn Islam for the brutality of some of its adherents while simultaneously condoning and even promoting the heinous brutality described in this article. Don't try and pretend that this is not Christianity - this is a direct result of Christian beliefs and values instilled in these people by missionaries from Western countries pushing their fundamentalist dogma throughout the world.

This bit pretty much sums up the situation…

The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over.

Instead, Uganda seems to have become a far-flung front line in the American culture wars, with American groups on both sides, the Christian right and gay activists, pouring in support and money as they get involved in the broader debate over homosexuality in Africa.

This passage clearly states that the Christian right continues to pour their money and support into this battle, having full knowledge of the Ugandan's evil ambitions to murder and oppress homosexuals. Just when you thought Christians couldn't possibly be any more evil they prove you wrong. Very nice!

01-03 The Lord Provides (for Murder)

2010-01-03T05:06:00.000-06:00

Calif. pastor takes in $2.4M after donations plea
Associated Press
January 3, 2010

LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Evangelical pastor Rick Warren's plea for donations to fill a $900,000 deficit at his Southern California megachurch brought in $2.4 million, Warren announced to cheers during a sermon at the church on Saturday.

Warren said the amount raised after the appeal was posted online Wednesday included only money parishioners brought in person to Saddleback Church by New Year's Eve. More was arriving by hand and by mail, he said.

"This is pretty amazing," said Warren, who made the announcement by bringing out 24 volunteers each holding a sign for $100,000. "I don't think any church has gotten a cash offering like that off a letter."

The pastor said he planned to talk about what he called his church's "radical generosity" in the rest of the weekend's sermons. He said the total came from members, and the donations were all under $100.

"We're starting the new decade with a surplus," he said. "It came from thousands of ordinary people. This was not one big fat cat."

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: Rick Warren is the very same pastor who refused to condemn a Ugandan Christian pastor's call for homosexuality to be punishable by death. Apparently, tens of thousands of god-fearing American Christians sent money to this evil prick having full knowledge of his murderous ambitions. Just when you thought Christians couldn't possibly be any more evil they prove you wrong. Nice!

01-02 Hell No!

2010-01-02T19:17:00.001-06:00

Limbaugh Lauds (Socialist) Medical Care in Hawaii
By Paul Abrams
January 2, 2010

"but I think the most likely reason of all was the Grinch had a heart two sizes too small" ("How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Dr. Seuss).

According to Rush Limbaugh, the health care reform that may be passed by Congress is socialism. Yet, it bears a striking resemblance to the universal healthcare system that just treated him in Hawaii that prompted his remark: "there is nothing wrong with the American health care system. I received no special treatment."

Yes, Rush. That's the point! American medicine is superb--for those who can get it. And, in Hawaii, no one gets special treatment, because everyone can get it.

[Er, by the way, just to help you out, Rush, a fair percentage of your listeners do not know Hawaii is part of the United States, so clarify that for them...otherwise, they will wonder about you]

By accepting socialist medical treatment in Hawaii, therefore, Rush Limbaugh has shown that, when one is ill, what matters is the availability of quality health care, even if it is socialist.

Rush follows a long litany of conservatives, such as all Members of Congress that have a medical office paid for by taxpayers available in the Capitol, by Dick Cheney who had socialist pacemakers implanted paid for by the government, and George W who had a government-paid socialist colonoscopy while in office. Members of Congress over 65 get single-payer socialist medical care from Medicare.

Hawaii has had nearly-universal employer-mandated health insurance since 1974. Although its Pacific Island location makes the costs of everything--from gasoline to milk to ice cream to housing--the highest in the nation, health care premiums in Hawaii, for comprehensive care with small co-pays and deductibles, are nearly the lowest and their costs per medicare beneficiary are the lowest in the nation.

Why? There are a variety of reasons, most traceable to universality. With everyone covered by primary care, emergency room visits tend to be for real emergencies, not the non-emergent care mainland ERs dispense for people without coverage. That reduces the costs of ERs and the costs of non-emergent medicine since patients can be handled less expensively and more effectively by their primary docs. Hospitals have not overbuilt, acquiring expensive machines to compete with their neighbors for patients. Insurance companies have instituted screening and other measures to improve wellness among their covered populations.

We can all be pleased that Rush appears to have survived his encounter with socialist medical care. He seems to be very happy himself, commenting on the results of a socialist angiogram that showed no disease in the arteries that feed his heart muscle.

Now, of course, Rush does not live in Hawaii and so his costs are not covered by the Hawaiian insurance system, but having that "socialist" system for more than 3 decades has not reduced the quality of the care he received. Who would have thunk it!

If Hawaii-style medical care is good enough for Rush Limbaugh, it is good enough for me.

Thanks Rush, and with it my hopes that your medical insurance covers all your costs and that the greatest country in the world can make that same care available to everyone.

Happy New Year!

CJ's Opinion: Rush believes only people who have the means to pay exorbitant sums of cash deserve healthcare - if you're not a good Capitalist then you don't deserve life-saving medical treatment. Rush believes it's only Socialism when healthcare assistance is provided for the poor - health redistribution that flows into the pockets of the rich is just good old American Capitalism. Rush is perfectly happy to sentence other people to death and misery while he reaps the benefits from a career dedicated to enriching himself at others' expense.

The bad thing about being an atheist is having full knowledge that there is no hell for people like Rush Limbaugh; there will be no punishment for his lifelong dedication to spreading misery to others. But I'm sure his god will reward him with a long life of luxury and personal success for his callous and merciless cruelty to those who are less fortunate than himself.

Of course, Rush probably believes he deserves to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the nation from Socialism. Personally, I would thoroughly enjoy shooting him in the face with a shotgun (no hell for me either).

01-01 The Worst Is Yet To Come

2010-01-01T02:09:00.000-06:00

Here's to the 2010s
Looking back a decade, it is difficult to recapture the optimism at the century's beginning. We had a booming economy, a fiscal surplus and were at peace. Now we have the great recession, huge deficits and two wars. ~ Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University

CJ Says: Happy New Year.

12-31 Irrepressible American Optimism

2009-12-31T12:50:00.000-06:00

Poll: Americans less hopeful about future
December 31, 2009

(CNN) -- Americans will usher in the new decade less hopeful than they were at the dawn of the millennium in 2000, says a new national poll.

In 1999, 85 percent of Americans surveyed said they were hopeful about their own future, and 68 percent said they were hopeful for what the New Year boded for the world.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Thursday found 69 percent of Americans hopeful for their future, and 51 percent hopeful for the world. See the full poll results (PDF)

The survey polled 1,160 Americans. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

CJ's Opinion: Oh no! Is my pessimism contagious?!

12-31 Worshipping the God of Fear

2009-12-31T02:06:00.001-06:00

What About My Right to Be Alive?
by Richard Miniter
December 30, 2009

The case against the liberal case against the war on terror.

The underpants bomber teaches us that there are two kinds of Americans: those who'd rather be right and those who'd rather be alive.

The passengers were decidedly in the second camp. People of all nationalities leaped over seats to pummel the burning would-be mass murderer. They didn't stop to ask whether he was a smoker with a nervous nic-fit or worry themselves with the cultural sensitivities of a man with a flaming derriere. They saw their duty and they did it. If they thought about it all, they figured they could sort out the bureaucratic niceties and put everything in the right boxes once the plane had safely landed in one of the murder capitals of the United States.

But those passengers are ordinary people whose opinions only matter during elections and in the heat of a crisis. Most of the time our security is in the warm little mitts of No. 2 pencil oval-fillers. They have the walnut-sized brains of a Tyrannosaurus rex who can't let go of the tiny good caught in their massive jaws and therefore can't seize upon the bigger, more important one. They are obsessed with rights—privacy rights, rights of the accused, right to a trial and so on. These rights are, undisputedly, good things. But exercising any of these rights means that individuals have to be, ahem, alive. The devilish thing about terrorism is that it too often pits the sanctity of certain civil rights against the lives of the innocent many. When this happens, the rights-obsessed tyrannosaurs either shut down completely like a computer in a 1960s Star Trek episode that can't abide a contradiction or, manfully assert—contra the Supreme Court—that yes, the Constitution is a suicide pact. It is better, they tell us, that we risk the lives of the public than we shrink the rights of the accused.

Read the full article here.

CJ's Opinion: You hypocritical Americans never cease to amaze me! In one breath you extol the patriotic virtues of American freedom and your willingness to fight and die to protect those freedoms; in the next you would have us deny those freedoms to people who look different than you or worship a different deity. Clearly, you don't understand the basic concept of the word 'patriotism' and don't deserve the right to call yourselves patriotic Americans.

You think you're these big American heroes for tackling a burning terrorist, but you're really just a bunch of frightened little cowards willing to sacrifice Freedom at the altar of Fear. There are two kinds of Americans: those who'd rather be right (Liberal patriots) and those who'd rather be alive (Conservative cowards).

12-30 Blackest Republican Pots

2009-12-30T23:54:00.001-06:00

Republican Hypocrisy on Terrorism Reaches New Levels of Awful
By Bob Cesca
December 30, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's public relations apparatus was firing on all cylinders Wednesday morning, with the release of a predictable statement about the failed Underpants Bomber fracas. And by "public relations apparatus" I mean "cable news and Politico."

Needless to say, Cheney is well-qualified to take an authoritative posture when it comes to terrorism. After all, he and his little buddy "kept us safe" from terrorist attacks for eight years, right? Other than the worst terrorist attack in American history, of course, along with the Anthrax Attacks, the Beltway Snipers, the thousands of terrorist attacks on our contractors and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the attacks on our allies in London and Madrid, Cheney did a fine job keeping us safe (more about this in my book). Good job, Mr. Cheney!

So it wasn't any surprise when Cheney stopped thumbing through Uncle Billy's misplaced $8,000 long enough to fire off a few words about the failed Underpants Bomber attempt and the Obama administration's response. And since Dick Cheney is a very serious terrorism expert -- mainly because more Americans died in terrorist attacks on his watch than any other vice president ever -- the media gobbled it up, practically unchallenged. Cheney said:

As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war.

First of all, way to condemn the attempted attack, Mr. Cheney -- oh wait, you didn't condemn anything other than the president. Sorry. You chose instead to attack the commander-in-chief while troops are in harm's way. Weren't you guys totally against that sort of thing, by the way? Oh right. Everything prior to January 20, 2009 doesn't count.

But that last part about giving "terrorists the rights of Americans" and letting them "lawyer up," is fascinating coming from Mr. Cheney.

Maybe the worms have begun to infect his brain to a point where he's forgotten about how his administration allowed Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber," to be prosecuted, tried, convicted and incarcerated on American soil in our civilian judicial system. And which administration was it that released the Yemeni plotters from Guantanamo? Guess. The year was 2007 and unless Barack Obama has a totally rad time traveling DeLorean, President Bush and Dick Cheney were running our anti-terrorism efforts at that point. Good job again, Mr. Cheney!

The reality is that Dick Cheney is fully aware of his inconsistencies and contradictions. This strategy of deliberate ignorance is a phenomenon that's rampant on the wingnut right. In fact, it's been going on for more than a year now, and it's absolutely reached a high water mark this week.

The wingnut right has been essentially recycling liberal attacks on Bush/Cheney and using them to attack President Obama and the current administration. It's literally a childish game of payback.

Read the full article here.

CJ's Opinion: Conservative Republicans have mastered the art of accusing others of their own transgressions; they give a whole new meaning to the 'pot calling the kettle black' euphemism.

They preside over the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor and then accuse Democrats of failing to protect American citizens. They preside over the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and then accuse Democrats of backing harmful economic policies. They preside over a massive bailout for big banks - socialist 'corporate welfare' that redistributes even more wealth to the wealthiest Americans - and then accuse Democrats of pushing a socialist agenda. They lead the charge against providing Medicare benefits and funding for senior citizens and then accuse Democrats of cutting Medicare funds to support health care reform. They hide billions from the taxman in Swiss bank accounts and offshore storefront corporations and then accuse Democrats of not paying their taxes. They unanimously oppose any and all Democratic legislation and Presidential nominations and then accuse Democrats of engaging in partisan politics. They preside over Republican states having high abortion rates and then accuse Democrats of killing babies. The list goes on and on and on ad nauseam.

These hypocritical bastards have no shame whatsoever. I've said it before and I'll say it again - the only good Republican is a dead Republican. Do the world a favor: hurry up and die (RL)!

12-30 Pay the Taxman

2009-12-30T07:22:00.000-06:00

America must overcome its allergy to taxes
By Matthew Dallek
December 29, 2009

Americans have not always hated taxes. The marginal tax rate was approximately 90% for the wealthiest Americans during World War II, but 85% to 90% of the public still described their tax rate as fair. In the mid-20th century, new payroll taxes were enacted to help pay for Social Security and Medicare, while federal taxes helped fund the Interstate Highway System, strengthened research and education at America's premier public universities and built the world's most powerful military.

The ethic enabling these advances has often counteracted the fierce individualistic streak pervading America's political culture. The nation's capacity to balance these dueling impulses has unleashed America's entrepreneurial spirit while underwriting some of America's greatest schools, bridges, laboratories and museums.

This balance is hanging by a thread. The anti-tax sentiment sweeping America since the 1970s continues to ripple across debates about politics and policy, with profound consequences.

The decades-long tax revolt undermined the nation's aging transit systems and public school facilities, and ever since Californians enacted Proposition 13 in 1978 as a cap on people's property taxes, an unyielding anti-tax consensus has taken hold. The politics are hard to miss.

President Ronald Reagan effectively portrayed his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale, as a tax-and-spend liberal, while President George H.W. Bush's no-new-taxes campaign promise undermined his public standing after he inked a bipartisan agreement to reduce the deficit partly by raising taxes. Even Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama pledged during their own presidential campaigns that under their budgets, only the wealthiest Americans would see their taxes increase.

So the country reaps what it sows. In recent times, the barely hidden antipathy toward "big government" and paying taxes has blocked progress and transcended ideological debates.

And so, we get labor unions who are opposed to taxing high-end health care plans to pay for extending health insurance to millions of Americans. Food and beverage lobbyists have run television commercials blasting proposals to tax soda. Even the proposed tax on indoor tanning - an eminently sensible idea that would raise money and discourage an unhealthy practice - has come under attack.

The proposal of House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) to impose a surtax to pay for Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan has received an icy reception on Capitol Hill.

The bottom line: Few elected leaders these days are willing to go to bat for the idea that shared sacrifice is required to improve the public sphere, even though studies show that the tax burden in America is the lightest in the developed world.

Stubborn anti-tax public opinion polls are a big part of the reason so few officials call on their constituents to sacrifice on behalf of the greater good.

[Snip]

Taxes are no magic solution to all that ails America. But if the United States is going to eliminate record red ink, expand health care coverage to millions, rebuild aging airports and roads, fight in Afghanistan and invest in scientific and medical research, then we must all be willing to pay more.

The status quo, comforting though it may seem to some, is a road map to an economically feebler America.

Dallek is a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center and acting director of the University of California Davis' Washington program.

Read the full articled here.

CJ's Opinion: Americans demand well maintained infrastructure systems, excellent educational facilities, a powerful military, corporate welfare for the rich, top-notch social services for senior citizens, but the deadbeats refuse to pay for it. In the end, you deadbeat Americans will pay even more for deferring the bill to the future. You will pay dearly. And you will deserve everything you get. I only hope I live long enough to witness the day of reckoning that will inevitably arrive.

12-30 You Get What You Pay For

2009-12-30T01:49:00.002-06:00

These greed-driven Conservative Republican Hoosiers don't want to pay taxes and don't want to pay for essential public services (GOP senators threaten sales tax rollback). To save money, they construct substandard roads and bridges that soon fall apart, which has resulted in the Cline Avenue bridge being condemned; it turns out you get exactly what you pay for - go figure. An editorial in the very same edition of The Times says they expect me to pay for their stupidity…

The governor, INDOT, legislators and local transportation planners need to unify in developing a sound alternative to bridging the Cline Avenue gap, whether it be a new elevated road surface or a ground-level roadway. Whatever the solution, it must restore the full Cline Avenue Expressway as a vital transportation link in Northwest Indiana. Anything less will not be acceptable.

The Conservative crowd also says they don't want to pay for public transportation systems. They say that any trains or buses should be funded by private sector entrepreneurs for profit or they are not worth being funded at all. Based upon their twisted logic, an alternative Cline Avenue project should also be funded by the private sector or it is not worth being funded at all. Why should we have to pay for your roads - pay for your own damn roads, you cheap bastards! Stop sponging off of the vast majority of people who don't use Cline Avenue. Stay out of our wallets!

12-29 Reap This!

2009-12-29T21:53:00.000-06:00

A Decade Far Worse Than a "Big Zero" (1999-2009)
By Joseph A. Palermo
December 29, 2009

Paul Krugman recently penned an insightful article where he argues that the 1999-2009 decade should be called the "Big Zero" decade because over the course of ten years there was no real job growth or notable "progress" in tackling any of the nation's problems. But Krugman's view, I'm afraid, is overly optimistic. What we had in the 2000s was far, far worse than a "Big Zero." The last ten years have been so miserable for the United States that a "Big Zero" would be an immeasurable improvement compared to what we got. If we could freeze time and move the country back to January 1999 it would be like hitting the jackpot! With all its squandered wealth, wasted lives, despoiled environment, growing inequality, and a Supreme Court stacked to favor corporate power, a "Big Zero" is a distant, unattainable goal.

Ronald Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989, leading many historians and journalists to call the 1980s the "Reagan Era" or the "Age of Reagan." George W. Bush served from 2001 to 2009, but is it fair to us to refer to the 2000s as the "W. Era?" I don't think so.

It was the decade when the country experienced the corporate take-over of everything -- every value, every human interaction, every institution.

Bush stacked the Supreme Court with two relatively young Justices who can be counted on, in perpetuity, to rule against people and in favor of corporations every time their interests clash. He also stuffed the federal judiciary with torture enthusiasts, religious fanatics, and corporate servants.

It was a decade when a new Gilded Age took hold led by Robber Barons far worse and rapacious than any of those associated with the turn of the last century. Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein, without irony, told the press that his financial behemoth was doing "God's work," just like John D. Rockefeller said over a century ago: "I believe the power to make money is a gift from God."

It was a decade where corporate advertising reached new levels with "word of mouth" marketing and "reality" TV shows that are little more than commercials posing as "television shows."

In November 1999, President Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act by signing the odious Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that deregulated, once and for all, the financial sector. Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Rubin lit the fuse that exploded the American economy ten wretched years later traumatizing the nation and sapping its lifeblood.

There was a "War on Terror" and "video news releases" to manipulate the public. In the past ten years the nation's two dominant political parties finally merged to represent essentially the same corporate interests. It was the decade when the ideological viewpoint of the National Association of Manufacturers, which was formed in 1895 to trash workers' pensions as "handouts," came to dominate the economic policies of both parties. Labor unions took it in the chin suffering setback after setback as real wages declined, unemployment rose, and pensions dwindled.

It was the decade of Enron and Worldcom and Global Crossing and Tyco and all those other corporate criminal rackets. Joe Lieberman, who received campaign donations from Enron, held a hearing where he tisk-tisked the practices that his own cheerleading for deregulation helped cause. And don't forget Blackwater and Haliburton and all the other war profiteers that made a killing, and the wars themselves we'll be paying for in overt pay-outs and hidden social costs for many decades to come. Death on the installment plan we might call it.

It was the decade when the "race to the bottom" resulting from "free trade" deals like NAFTA and the WTO came to apotheosis. The outsourcing and international trade imbalances hollowed out the American economy, eliminated whole categories of manufacturing jobs, and pushed the U.S. on a trajectory less like Europe and more like Mexico. China owns us.

During the 2000 campaign there was a running joke that George W. Bush got so much record-breaking corporate campaign cash that he wasn't really a human being seeking the presidency but a corporation. We can call the 2000s the "Worse Than Zero" decade or the "Big Zero," or anything we wish, but what characterized it most for me was the near total control of corporations, especially over our civic institutions. All of the terrible economic and governing ideas from the Reagan era crested and then crashed in the last eighteen months leaving something far less than "zero" in their wake.

CJ's Opinion: I entirely agree with this dismal assessment of the American condition. You stupid Americans will now reap what you have sown. Ha!

12-29 American Hysteria

2009-12-29T05:19:00.000-06:00

Terrorism Hysteria
By Malou Innocent
December 27, 2009

In times of terrorism, the first casualty is American values. After 9/11, Americans witnessed the shredding of habeas corpus, torture of terrorist suspects, lawless secret prisons, warrantless wiretaps, and the trillion dollar debacle known as Iraq.

One would hope that incidents like the recent failed attack over Detroit have made us all more aware of the insidious aftereffects that terrorism can have on our body politic. As my Cato Institute colleague Jim Harper trenchantly notes:

Though it certainly helps, terrorism doesn't require explosions and fatalities to work its will. If public fear produced by this incident drives the U.S. toward self-injurious overreactions--abandonment of plane travel, overwrought and poorly directed security measures, and so on--then it will be a successful act of terrorism. The behavior of the Obama administration, political leaders in Congress, and the media will determine whether this is a successful act of terrorism.

The Obama administration must counter its impulse to overreact to this recent terrorist incident. We would have learned nothing from 9/11 if we misdirect more of our country's limited energies and scarce resources to feed our unwieldy homeland security department, especially since the bravery of average folks (rather than billions of dollars spent in counterterrorism equipment) is what saved Flight 253. Perhaps the worst conclusion pundits might draw from this foiled attack is that the continued prosecution of wars overseas will keep America safe from terrorism; in fact such counterproductive efforts only play into al Qaeda's hands.

CJ's Opinion: It doesn't take very much at all to terrorize these frightened little American cowards; they will cower in fear from the slightest act of aggression. The majority of the world lives with acts of terrorism on a regular basis (precipitated largely by America's foreign policies) and they manage to live their lives without hiding under their beds in a constant state of panic. But let someone frighten the passengers on an airplane and virtually every American in the country is afraid to leave their house. You pathetic little cowards deserve your plight. Now go hide under a rock and stop your incessant whining!

12-26 Inferior American Innovation

2009-12-26T18:59:00.000-06:00

China unveils 'world's fastest train link'
December 26, 2009

BEIJING (AFP) – China on Saturday unveiled what it billed as the fastest rail link in the world -- a train connecting the modern cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan at an average speed of 350 kilometres (217 miles) an hour.

The super-high-speed train reduces the 1,069 kilometre journey to a three hour ride and cuts the previous journey time by more than seven and a half hours, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Work on the project began in 2005 as part of plans to expand a high-speed network aimed at eventually linking Guangzhou, a business hub in southern China near Hong Kong, with the capital Beijing, Xinhua added.

"The train can go 394.2 kilometres per hour, it's the fastest train in operation in the world," Zhang Shuguang, head of the transport bureau at the railways ministry, told Xinhua.

Test runs for the service began earlier in December and the link officially went into service when the first scheduled train left the eastern metropolis of Wuhan on Saturday.

By comparison, the average for high-speed trains in Japan was 243 kilometres per hour while in France it was 277 kilometres per hour, said Xu Fangliang, general engineer in charge of designing the link, according to Xinhua.

Beijing has an ambitious rail development programme aimed at increasing the national network from the current 86,000 kilometres to 120,000 kilometres, making it the most extensive rail system outside the United States.

China unveiled its first high-speed line at the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 -- a service linking the capital with the port city of Tianjin.

In September, officials said they planned to build 42 high-speed lines by 2012 in a massive system overhaul as part of efforts to spur economic growth amid the global downturn.

The network uses technology developed in co-operation with foreign firms such as Siemens, Bombardier and Alstom.

CJ's Opinion: Once again, Chinese innovation leaves the US far behind in its dust. Instead of world leaders we have become world followers (transportation, green technology, particle physics, medical research, healthcare, etc.). Now we can only hope to emulate the superior innovation of the Chinese.

12-24 America is Broken

2009-12-24T16:13:00.000-06:00

US Congress Is Corrupt, Systemically Broken
December 23, 2009

During an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe today journalist and author Carl Bernstein lamented that the debate over and the writing of health care reform legislation has shown us "Congress at its worst."

Bernstein harshly critiques the nation's legislative branch as a body that is "responsive only to money and special interests" while ignoring the public and national interest:

The bad news is the really great problem in this country is the systemic breakdown of one of the three branches of government: the Congress of the United States. And until it's repaired, [Obama] and this country are going to be undermined. We could have had health care legislation in a meaningful way that would have gone twice as far at solving our budget and our health care problems, but because of the irresponsibility and the systemic corruption of the United States Congress, we don't.

See the video here.

CJ's Opinion: The United States government is rotten at its core (the Legislative Branch) and it's rotten at its heart (the Constitution). The US Constitution was written over two centuries ago for an entirely different country under an entirely different set of circumstances by people having an entirely different value system. It has been outdated for over a century and has become completely incongruous with today's America. The United States system of government is broken beyond repair.

12-22 You People Never Learn

2009-12-22T15:32:00.000-06:00

Wall Street's 10 Biggest Lies of 2009
By Les Leopold
December 21, 2009

Say goodbye to 2009, the worst economic year since the Great Depression.

Say hello to the billionaire bailout society in which the super-rich gamble, lose and get bailed out by the rest of us.

To save the system from total collapse we poured trillions of dollars into the financial sector. The result? Banks still are refusing to lend. Thirty million Americans are looking for full-time jobs and 49 million are skipping meals including one out of four children. But Wall Street again is reaping record profits and bonuses.

Not only are we richly rewarding those who wrecked our economy, but also, we have to put up with hundreds of fabrications about how the big banks got us here. Here is my biggest, fattest lies list for 2009:

1. "Government programs for low-income home buyers caused the financial crash." Wall Street defenders were quick to blame the Community Reinvestment Act, which urges banks to loan money in minority communities. In fact, almost none of the CRA loans are sub-prime and the vast majority are doing well, thank you. Blaming government programs deflects us from the real cause: Wall Street's incredibly reckless creation, marketing, selling and trading of "innovative" new securities that supposedly removed the risk from pools of risky debt. It didn't work. Wall Street, not the poor, crashed our economy.

2. "Income inequality is good for everyone." Lord Brian Griffiths, Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs at least had the nerve to say what so many of the super-rich really believe:

"We have to accept that inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all."

Unfortunately, the facts suggest otherwise. There is a high correlation between the mal-distribution of income and economic crashes. The last time our wealth and income distribution was as skewed as it is today was 1929, and that's not an accident. When too much money is in the hands of the few it runs out of real world investment and gravitates towards speculative investments. This inevitably creates asset bubbles and crashes. Record pay and bonuses on Wall Street and high unemployment are connected. (See The Looting of America Chapter 11).

3. "The rising number of billionaires is a sign of economic health." It's accepted media wisdom that the more billionaires the better. China with 130 billionaires now trails only the US, which has 359, according to Forbes magazine. But in our billionaire bailout society, the rising number of billionaires signals a collapsing middle class. Ponder this statistic: In 1970 the ratio of the compensation of the top 100 CEOs compared to the average production worker was 45 to 1. By 2006 it was an astounding 1,723 to one. Does that look healthy to you?

4. "Paying back TARP means banks are no longer on government welfare." Bank after bank is rushing to repay TARP funds during the worst economic year since 1937. They want to get out from under the Pay Czar (not that he's been sufficiently tough on the banks under his purview.) Banks that were insolvent only a few months ago now say they have the financial strength to refund tens of billions of dollars to the government. Where did all that money come from? Much of it comes from other government welfare programs for Wall Street (over $12 trillion worth) that aren't publicized. (See Nomi Prins's excellent accounting.) It may be the case that our banks are paying us back with our own money. Now that's financial innovation.

5. "Wall Street's freedom to innovate must be protected." Congressional leaders are tripping all over themselves to say new regulations will not discourage Wall Street innovations, something they claim is vital to our economy. Oh really? Do those "innovations" add anything useful to our country other than new casino games for the super-rich? Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volker, recently blew the whistle on this fabrication:

"I hear about these wonderful innovations in the financial markets and they sure as hell need a lot of innovation. I can tell you of two - Credit Default Swaps and CDOs - which took us right to the brink of disaster: were they wonderful innovations that we want to create more of?

.... I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information....

The most important financial innovation that I have seen in the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine... How many other innovations can you tell me of that have been as important to the individual?" ("What Has Financial Innovation Done for You?")

6. "To retain critically needed talent, Wall Street must be free to pay top salaries and bonuses." Where would they flee if they just got paid like normal people rather than like gods? The British are putting in place a 50 percent tax on bonuses. Also, compensation is much, much lower in the European Union. But the real lie is that we need such "talent" in the first place. That kind of "talent" just crashed our economy. That kind of "talent" is widely overpaid - no way should bond traders receive 10 to 100 times what is earned by the best neurosurgeons in the world. Something is really wrong and it starts with the lie of banking "talent."

7. "Overpaid American workers are the real cause of unemployment." The New York Times writers who concocted this argument didn't think they were lying. But this is one of the most preposterous ideas put forth during 2009. ("American Wages out of Balance" New York Times November 11, 2009) Edward Hadas, Martin Huchinson and Antony Currie informed us that:

"American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance."

They don't mention that the average non-supervisory worker has already taken an 18 percent cut in real wages between 1973 and 2007. What's worse, they claim that if workers don't take these additional cuts, these "overpaid" working stiffs will be the cause of another Great Depression. They write:

"But if American wages get stuck above global market-clearing levels, as in the 1930s, the result could well be something approaching Depression-era levels of unemployment."

Not a word is mentioned about how Wall Street's gambling caused all of this unemployment and how the continued failure of Wall Street banks to lend is stalling job growth, right now.

8. "I'm doing God's Work." Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman of Goldman Sachs said what too many Wall Street leaders truly believe: that they are so privileged and entitled that it seems as if the heavens bless their work. Why else are they earning hundreds of millions of dollars? Mr. Blankfein believes he is creating a virtuous circle by raising capital for corporations who create jobs and help our society prosper. But Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and the rest of the apostles helped to bring the entire world economy to its knees. Does that mean God likes unemployment and widespread hunger?

9. "We're out of money." Who's we? Yes, the middle class is tapped out but the super-rich haven't even begun to pay their fair share for the mess they created. Yet the top 400 richest Americans alone are sitting on $1.27 trillion or so in wealth. Here's a dangerous thought. What if we had a very steeply progressive wealth/income tax that reduced the net worth of the super-rich to "only" about $100 million each? You wouldn't be suffering if you had $100 million kicking around. Now do the math: The 400 richest x $100 million each would equal $40 billion. That would leave about $1.23 trillion to help pay back the country for the Wall Street meltdown that we, our children and their children will be subsidizing.

10. "We are becoming a socialist economy." Somewhere between 68 and 78 percent of the US GDP is private sector activity, the highest among developed nations. And much of the government expenditures go to private contractors as well. But there's a kernel of truth in the socialist scare: What do you call a society that encourages the private accumulation of wealth without limit, and then when the super-wealthy get into serious trouble, we bail them out with taxpayer funds - largely from a declining middle-class? That's not free-enterprise. That's not socialism either. It's something new and it deserves to be called the billionaire bailout society.

Here's hoping that in 2010 we can begin to undo it.

CJ's Opinion: This is exactly why the banks rule America - because Americans are too stoopid to figure out what's being done to them in the name of Greed. Washington politicians will make a big show of cracking down on Wall Street but, in the end, nothing will change. Moron Americans deserve what they get.

12-18 State Sanctioned Murder

2009-12-18T03:45:00.000-06:00

Death penalty use declining nationwide
By Bill Mears
December 18, 2009

Report: Fewer death sentences were handed down in 2009 than any year since 1976
Eleven states are now considering abolishing executions
Nine men who had been sentenced to death were exonerated, freed this year
Washington (CNN) -- Use of capital punishment by states continues its steady decline, with fewer death sentences handed down in 2009 than any year since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.

Year-end figures released Friday by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) show 11 states are now considering abolishing executions, with many legislators citing high costs associated with incarcerating and handling often decades-long appeals by death row inmates.

"The annual number of death sentences in the U.S. has dropped for seven straight years," said Richard Dieter, the report's author and DPIC's executive director. "In the last two years, three states have abolished capital punishment and a growing number of states are asking whether it's worth keeping. This entire decade has been marked by a declining use of the death penalty."

DPIC is a nonpolitical group that provides facts and analysis, while opposing capital punishment as impractical and ineffective.

There were 106 death sentences issued in 2009, compared with a high of 328 in 1994. Death sentences have dropped 63 percent since 2000, when there were 235 issued.

Fifty-two inmates were executed this year in 11 states. The last was Matthew Wrinkles on December 11 in Indiana. He was convicted of murdering his wife and two family members 15 years ago.

Late Wednesday, Georgia issued a stay of execution for Carlton Gary. Known as the "Columbus Strangler," he was convicted of murdering three women with their own stockings and was suspected of four other similar killings. He has been given more time to file further appeals.

As in previous years, Texas in 2009 led the states in executions, with 24 -- four times as many as the next-highest, Alabama.

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: The only difference between American justice and Islamic justice is that we murder people with drugs instead of swords and stones - the victim is just as dead either way.

The article cites prohibitively high costs as the primary reason for the declining rate of executions. As usual, the only thing that these blood-thirsty Americans care about more than killing is their money.

Except for Texas, of course - home of George Bush, Texans are by far the most blood-thirsty, murderous bunch of assholes in the country. Of course, the only good Texan is a dead Texan, so I guess the high execution rate in Texas is a good thing.

Personally, I'll be happy when Texas succeeds in seceding from the Union - good riddance to the evil bastards!

12-17 You're Pissed - So What?!

2009-12-17T01:02:00.000-06:00

I'm Really Pissed Off About Health Care Reform
By Bob Cesca
December 16, 2009

I'm pissed off.

I'm pissed off at health care reform. I'm pissed off at this endless process of emotional highs and lows and exhilaration and dejection and history and infamy.

I'm pissed off that President Obama "thanked" the independent senator from Connecticut even though the senator nearly killed health care reform this week.

To that point, I'm pissed off at Joe Lieberman. I'm pissed off at his childish, vengeful, opposite-day hackery. I'm pissed off at his giant pie-shaped head and his passive aggression. I'm pissed off that he enjoys government-run Medicare benefits while opposing government-run insurance for the rest of us.

I'm pissed off at the Senate. The whole Senate. The rules, the senators, the color of the walls, the fact that a doof like Chuck Grassley can actually be elected to it. Multiple times. I'm pissed off that even though we finally have a 60 seat supermajority, it's dysfunctional and Harry Reid is in charge of it. I'm pissed off that senators of both parties receive government-run primary care from the Office of the Attending Physician, while denying it to everyone else.

I'm pissed off at cable news and the establishment press for focusing more on The David Letterman & Tiger Woods Underpants Party than the substance of health care reform.

I'm pissed off at Rahm Emanuel and I'm pissed off at the "scary profane a-hole" mythology that's built up around him, and how he only seems to use his powers of intimidation to bully the left.

I'm pissed off at the Republicans. I'm pissed off at their ongoing self-contradictions and lies and bumper sticker sloganeering. I'm pissed off that around 55 Republicans are on Medicare, yet they oppose government-run health care for the rest of us.

I'm pissed off at Tom Coburn's bulbous Dirk Diggler haircut.

I'm pissed off at having to compromise while a handful of lopsidedly powerful conservadems get whatever they ask for.

I'm pissed off at the Senate health care reform bill. I'm pissed off at the House health care reform bill. I'm preemptively pissed off at the conference report, too, and I don't even know if we'll even get that far.

And I'm pissed off that my progressivism leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that if we don't pass health care reform now, innumerable bad things will continue to happen due to the fact that there's a very serious health care crisis in America. I'm pissed off that I can't, in good conscience, allow my anger to coerce me into believing that we should "kill this bill." I'm pissed off about that, too, because I know what could have been, and yet I have no other choice but to settle for what is. For now.

But being pissed off doesn't make this reality any less real.

Read the full rant here.

CJ's Opinion: I get it. You're pissed off. So what?! You'll sit back and eat the shit that Conservatives dish out because you're a Liberal Pussy. You'll wail and moan and complain, but in the end you'll accept your lot because you have no cojones. Effete Liberals like to demonstrate how oh-so-civilized they can be while angry Conservatives walk all over them and get everything they want.

You pathetic losers deserve exactly what you get. Now shut up and eat it!

12-16 Condemned to Repeat the Past

2009-12-16T22:38:00.000-06:00

A GOP sequel that's worse than no
By Gov. Tim Kaine
December 16, 2009

A year ago this month, our economy lost 700,000 jobs. Our financial markets were reeling from reckless decisions made on Wall Street, and leading economists wondered if we were hurtling toward a second Great Depression. As workers watched their dreams of retirement slip away and small-business owners postponed their big plans because of a lack of credit, the American people fumed as the very investment bankers and hedge fund managers who instigated the financial meltdown pleaded for a government rescue.

Last week, the U.S. House took an important step toward reining in Wall Street’s excesses and restoring balance to our banking system with financial regulatory reform legislation: the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009.

The bill passed the House 223-202, with no GOP votes — unfortunate, but not surprising, considering Republicans began the week by huddling with 100 Wall Street lobbyists to strategize how to kill the bill.

This is the story we’ve seen play out time and again during the past year. President Barack Obama and Dems propose an idea, and Republicans say no way. It’s almost a reflex: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — “no”; equal pay for women — “no”; clean energy — “no”; health insurance reform — “no”; and now financial regulatory reform gets a “no” from the GOP, too.

We’ve called out the Republicans this year as the “party of no,” but the GOP is increasingly moving beyond “no” to revisit recent history. Republicans are aggressively advocating for a do-over of Bush-era policies that have already proved disastrous — tax cuts for the wealthy, massive deregulation, high deficits and an economic program that left working Americans scrambling for cover.

Republicans’ ideological commitment to those demonstrably failed ideas is even more dangerous to American families and workers than their “just say no” approach.

Had our financial system collapsed last year, it would have dragged the entire world economy down with it. By voting unanimously against regulatory reform, the GOP either doesn’t remember the financial crisis or doesn’t care enough to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Republicans not only voted against reforms that will make our markets more transparent and accountable, but they also voted against the creation of a consumer financial protection agency that would end the financial sector’s most abusive practices. They are fighting with all their might to return us to the policies that benefit their special friends — to the detriment of everyone else.

Democrats have made helping American workers and small businesses a cornerstone of our economic recovery. The previous administration gave us a painful lesson in what happens when you advocate only on behalf of the big guys.

The Recovery Act has saved or created up to 1.6 million jobs and raised gross domestic product by as much as 3.2 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It gave 95 percent of working Americans a tax cut, provided $5 billion of tax relief to small businesses and has generated more than $13 billion in new lending to 65,000 small businesses across the country, among the hardest hit by the recession.

Health insurance reform will help small businesses by lowering costs, thereby freeing up the capital they need to grow, create new jobs and compete in the global market.

Last week, Obama laid out his principles for a jobs bill: helping small businesses grow, investing in our nation’s infrastructure and providing rebates to consumers who retrofit their homes to be more energy efficient. By investing in the ingenuity of our small-business owners and the sweat equity of our skilled trades and creating a vibrant U.S. market for green industries, we’ll not only put America back to work — but also put the country on a path to a more prosperous future.

Republican grumbling about the president’s jobs bill amounts to more of the same. House Minority Leader John Boehner’s recent “economic forum” was a who’s who of Bush administration officials responsible for driving our economy into a ditch. Their ideas were ones that have already failed us: cut regulations on the very businesses whose risky behavior got us into this mess; give tax breaks to the wealthy instead of ordinary Americans; maintain our dependence on foreign sources of oil by doing nothing about the threat of climate change; protect the health insurance industry’s iron grip on our nation’s broken health care system and cut spending on education and job-creating infrastructure projects. Nothing new there.

Obama inherited a terrible mess, which was the direct result of Republicans’ economic and fiscal incompetence. By investing in workers and small businesses, by insisting on transparency, accountability and balanced budgets and by finally tackling the big problems that have shackled our economy for too long — a broken health care system, a failed energy policy and an education system that doesn’t do enough to help our kids compete — Democrats are making progress.

If the GOP had its way, we’d be suffering through the same policies that cost us millions of jobs, caused trillions of dollars in retirement funds to evaporate, exploded our national deficit and caused us to miss opportunities in emerging global industries. The American people can’t afford to live through the sequel of failed Republican policies.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

CJ's Opinion: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Americans are so incredibly stupid that they can't understand what's being done to them by the wealthy ruling class. You deserve what you get. Ha!

12-16 Moron Americans

2009-12-16T15:52:00.001-06:00

Alcohol and marijuana did not cause dangerous cholesterol buildup that required bypass surgery at 46 years of age - it was genetics combined with a typical American diet, you stupid dick. Americans are so incredibly stooopid. And too cowardly to give their real names when delivering their stupid comments - typical frightened little American cowards.

12-15 A Good Republican

2009-12-15T04:35:00.000-06:00

The only good Republican is a dead Republican.

12-11 Conservativism Happened to America

2009-12-11T23:00:00.001-06:00

Senators Should Visit a Free Health Care Clinic to Really See the America They Represent... and Deny
By Ed Schultz
December 11, 2009

On Thursday, I hosted my MSNBC "Ed Show" from the Kansas City Convention Center. There have been few days in my thirty year broadcasting career that have moved me as much as this experience did. I saw the real America. In the middle of the country, two thousand miles from the beltway, I witnessed middle class Americans standing in line for hours waiting to see a doctor. Some had not seen a doctor in years. They have jobs, some working two jobs, but can't afford the cost of insurance and basically are on the GOP plan: pray you don't get sick.

The stories were gut wrenching. I couldn't help but think this is where the Senate needs to do their business. Do it right in front of the eyes of the people in their own country who are struggling to make ends meet and live in dignity. The Senate should do business in front of the families that have played by the rules and have been dealt a personal setback for one reason or another. Have the guts to tell these people to their face that they aren't worthy of health care because they don't have money. They may see these faces briefly on the campaign trail, but they make no decisions in front of them when they are standing in line in pain, in agony and in desperate need.

America has a heartless side to it as well. That is demonstrated when U.S. Senators put the God Almighty Dollar in front of people who put them in office. How any law maker could deny full access and full health care coverage is beyond me. Senators who put themselves ahead of the people and who have been spoiled by the Washington good life have lost their soul and what it means to be an American. We throw billions of dollars at wars, often without hesitation, but some in the Congress are willing to treat humans in their own country like a piece of machinery that can be left in a junk yard.

My God, what has happened to America?

In the arena of despair and need, I saw firsthand the best of America. Over 1600 volunteers and more than 600 medical personnel and fifty five doctors willing to take the personal time and care about this crisis. Care about their fellow countryman and neighbor. Heroes, that's what they are. Not selfish lawmakers who have best health care in the world. These were real heroes who hoped for a better America and were willing to take the time to do their part. The National Association of Free Clinics and the people who work in this organization are the best of the best. They should be doing the voting, making the policy and writing the rules. Not heartless self indulged Senators who we have been trusted to be the care takers of our country.

I beg the Senate: please make the correct decision for this country and pass the torch to a new generation with compassion and moral compass with a health care bill that never falls short of any need for any American.

CJ's Opinion: What has happened to America? Conservatism! Conservatives value money above all else, with no regard for the suffering of others. Conservative values are self-centered and immoral - Conservative people are heartless and cruel. If you want "compassion and moral compass" then you'll need to move to a different country - any country other than the rotten US of Assholes.

12-11 Big Money Dictators

2009-12-11T13:44:00.000-06:00

How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care
By Robert Reich
December 10, 2009

The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them. Some might say it's no great loss at this point because the Senate bill Harry Reid came up with contained a public option available only to 4 million people, which would have been far too small to exert any competitive pressure on private insurers anyway.

To provide political cover to senators who want to tell their constituents that the intent behind a robust public option lives on, the emerging Senate bill makes Medicare available to younger folk (age 55), and lets people who aren't covered by their employers buy in to a system that's similar to the plan that federal employees now have, where the federal government's Office of Personnel Management selects from among private insurers.

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.

A system based on private insurers won't control costs because private insurers barely compete against each other. According to data from the American Medical Association, only a handful of insurers dominate most states. In 9 states, 2 insurance companies control 85 percent or more of the market. In Arkansas, home to Senator Blanche Lincoln, who doesn't dare cross Big Insurance, the Blue Cross plan controls almost 70 percent of the market; most of the rest is United Healthcare. These data, by the way, are from 2005 and 2006. Since then, private insurers have been consolidating like mad across the country. At this rate by 2014, when the new health bill kicks in and 30 million more Americans buy health insurance, Big Insurance will be really Big.

In light of all this, you'd think the insurance industry would be subject to the antitrust laws, so the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission could prevent it from combining into one or two national behemoths that suck every health dollar out of our pockets (as well as the pockets of companies paying part of the cost of their employees' health insurance). But no. Remarkably, the Senate bill still keeps Big Insurance safe from competition by preserving its privileged exemption from the antitrust laws.

From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's also their political power, as we've learned over the last ten months. Economic and political power is a potent combination. Without some mechanism forcing private insurers to compete, we're going to end up with a national health care system that's controlled by a handful of very large corporations accountable neither to American voters nor to the market.

CJ's Opinion: Big Banks own America - Big Insurance and Big Pharma own our lives. They create the rules and nobody can stop them. Resistance is futile.

12-11 It's All About Joe's Wife

2009-12-11T13:02:00.000-06:00

FDL pushes breast cancer group to fire Hadassah Lieberman
By Ben Smith
December 11, 2009

The liberal blog Firedoglake is going after the Connecticut senator's wife in a letter to Nancy Brinker, the head of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.

Blogger Jane Hamsher, a cancer survivor, writes:

It has come to my attention via an article by Joe Conason in Salon that Hadassah Lieberman — wife of Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — is currently a compensated “Global Ambassador” for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It is widely known, however, that not only has Senator Lieberman been an instrument of obstruction to the kind of health care reform advocated by Susan G. Komen for the Cure, but that Mrs. Lieberman is also a former lobbyist for APCO Associates, which represents the interests of the same major, private health insurance and pharmaceutical companies which Mr. Lieberman seeks to protect.

Mrs. Lieberman’s relationship with Susan G. Komen for the Cure is unethical and misleading. Important and often very personal donations made to Susan G. Komen for the Cure to benefit the sick and dying are essentially undermining their intended use. And as Hadassah travels the globe under the banner of Susan G. Komen for the cure, decrying the inadequacies of our health care system and the desperate need to reform it, her husband is at home to kill the reform efforts we so desperately need.

CJ's Opinion: Joe is a self-serving pig and Joe's wife is a self-serving pig - a match made in hell.

12-10 Dying in America

2009-12-10T02:20:00.000-06:00

Dying for affordable healthcare — the uninsured speak
In a week of claim and counter-claim about the merits of healthcare provision in the US and UK, Ed Pilkington travelled to Quindaro, Kansas, to see how the poorest survive.
By Ed Pilkington
21 August 2009

Over the last month President Obama's attempts to live up to his election promise to extend healthcare to all Americans has stalled in the face of a sustained rightwing guerrilla attack. Opponents of Obama's reforms have succeeded in distracting attention from Manley and the 46 million other medically uninsured, swinging the focus instead on to the "evils" of publicly funded healthcare. The fear tactics were epitomised by Sarah Palin's wholly inaccurate claim that the reforms would set up "death panels" that would force euthanasia on to older people.

Such scaremongering has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley in Kansas City. "I'm very angry, very angry," she says. "Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost – a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed."

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: I've also been in front of the death panel - and lost. My fellow Americans have sentenced me to death - that is why I hate Americans and the American system that endorses your viciousness. I hope you suffer the same fate you've dealt to me. I hope you all die horribly with no prospect of mercy.

12-09 Saving Ourselves…First

2009-12-09T20:31:00.000-06:00

Saving Ourselves From...Ourselves
By Kofi Annan
December 9, 2009

Tragically, it is the poorest and least responsible who are having to bear the brunt of the climate challenge as rising temperatures exacerbate poverty, hunger and vulnerability to disease for billions of people. They need both immediate help to strengthen their climate resilience as well as long-term support to enable them to adapt to changing weather patterns, reduce deforestation, and pursue low-emissions, clean energy growth strategies.

Read the full article here.

CJ's Opinion: This is the reason Conservative Americans are opposed to global warming mitigation efforts - because the wealthy have far less to fear from climate change than those who are more vulnerable. If it gets hot we can just crank up the air conditioner and take a dip in the pool.

But that's OK - you will pay. One way or another, you will pay dearly. And it is Good!

12-09 Global Warming Redux

2009-12-09T03:26:00.000-06:00

Going Cheney on Climate
By Thomas L. Friedman
December 8, 2009

As this paper just reported: “Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday. The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record.”

This is not complicated. We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.

What we don’t know, because the climate system is so complex, is what other factors might over time compensate for that man-driven warming, or how rapidly temperatures might rise, melt more ice and raise sea levels. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before. We just know two things: one, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for many years, so it is “irreversible” in real-time (barring some feat of geo-engineering); and two, that CO2 buildup has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” warming.

When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is “irreversible” and potentially “catastrophic,” I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.

If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? Well, during a transition period, we would have higher energy prices. But gradually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering more and more of our homes and factories with wind, solar, nuclear and second-generation biofuels. We would be much less dependent on oil dictators who have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs; our trade deficit would improve; the dollar would strengthen; and the air we breathe would be cleaner. In short, as a country, we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent.

But if we don’t prepare, and climate change turns out to be real, life on this planet could become a living hell. And that’s why I’m for doing the Cheney-thing on climate — preparing for 1 percent.

Read the full story here.

CJ's Opinion: I said this exact same thing in an essay I wrote over a year ago. When dealing with Mother Nature it is far better to err on the side of caution.

12-08 American Ingenuity

2009-12-08T20:03:00.000-06:00

CJ's Opinion: How 'bout some giant snow machines?! ;)

12-07 It's All About Joe

2009-12-07T10:41:00.002-06:00

12-07 COP 15

2009-12-07T03:21:00.002-06:00

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'
This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages.

7 December 2009

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

CJ's Opinion: I find this paragraph of particular interest…

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

It sounds to me as though this common editorial published in 56 newspapers in 45 countries in 20 languages is saying that the US presents a 'clear and present danger' to world security if we continue to obstruct efforts to mitigate climate change. I'm very curious what the consequences will be of further US intransigence on this matter. Will the world be willing to take drastic measures to force the US into compliance? WW III perhaps?

Since I am highly confident that American leaders will refuse to cooperate with the rest of the world on global warming initiatives, this could get very interesting. I only hope I live long enough to witness the exciting conclusion.

12-07 Naïvety

2009-12-07T01:48:00.000-06:00

An Affordable Truth
By Paul Krugman
December 6, 2009

Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m feeling optimistic about the climate talks starting in Copenhagen on Monday. President Obama now plans to address the conference on its last day, which suggests that the White House expects real progress. It’s also encouraging to see developing countries - including China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide - agreeing, at least in principle, that they need to be part of the solution.

Of course, if things go well in Copenhagen, the usual suspects will go wild. We’ll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen e-mail messages that show - well, actually all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind. We’ll also, however, hear cries that climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth.

The truth, however, is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is affordable as well as essential. Serious studies say that we can achieve sharp reductions in emissions with only a small impact on the economy’s growth. And the depressed economy is no reason to wait - on the contrary, an agreement in Copenhagen would probably help the economy recover.

Why should you believe that cutting emissions is affordable? First, because financial incentives work.

Action on climate, if it happens, will take the form of “cap and trade”: businesses won’t be told what to produce or how, but they will have to buy permits to cover their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So they’ll be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon - and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll be clever and creative about finding ways to do just that.

As a recent study by McKinsey & Company showed, there are many ways to reduce emissions at relatively low cost: improved insulation; more efficient appliances; more fuel-efficient cars and trucks; greater use of solar, wind and nuclear power; and much, much more. And you can be sure that given the right incentives, people would find many tricks the study missed.

The truth is that conservatives who predict economic doom if we try to fight climate change are betraying their own principles. They claim to believe that capitalism is infinitely adaptable, that the magic of the marketplace can deal with any problem. But for some reason they insist that cap and trade - a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems - can’t work.

Well, they’re wrong - again. For we’ve been here before.

The acid rain controversy of the 1980s was in many respects a dress rehearsal for today’s fight over climate change. Then as now, right-wing ideologues denied the science. Then as now, industry groups claimed that any attempt to limit emissions would inflict grievous economic harm.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

Curbing greenhouse gases will be a much bigger and more complex task - but we’re likely to be surprised at how easy it is once we get started.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by 2050 the emissions limits in recent proposed legislation would reduce real G.D.P. by between 1 percent and 3.5 percent from what it would otherwise have been. If we split the difference, that says that emissions limits would slow the economy’s annual growth over the next 40 years by around one-twentieth of a percentage point - from 2.37 percent to 2.32 percent.

That’s not much. Yet if the acid rain experience is any guide, the true cost is likely to be even lower.

Still, should we be starting a project like this when the economy is depressed? Yes, we should - in fact, this is an especially good time to act, because the prospect of climate-change legislation could spur more investment spending.

Consider, for example, the case of investment in office buildings. Right now, with vacancy rates soaring and rents plunging, there’s not much reason to start new buildings. But suppose that a corporation that already owns buildings learns that over the next few years there will be growing incentives to make those buildings more energy-efficient. Then it might well decide to start the retrofitting now, when construction workers are easy to find and material prices are low.

The same logic would apply to many parts of the economy, so that climate change legislation would probably mean more investment over all. And more investment spending is exactly what the economy needs.

So let’s hope my optimism about Copenhagen is justified. A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford - and it would actually help us in our current economic predicament.

CJ's Opinion: Cap and trade will fail. Americans are too stupid to understand simple concepts - they deserve to suffer the consequences of their stupidity.

12-06 Excessive Executive Compensation

2009-12-06T21:04:00.000-06:00

Political Grandstanding: Excessive Compensation and the Health Care Bill
By Aaron Zelinsky
December 6, 2009

In the pending health care bill, Senate Democrats have finally addressed the taxpayer subsidy of excessive executive compensation. Unfortunately, their limited proposal is little more than political grandstanding.

The current bill denies corporate income tax deductions for excessive executive salaries paid in the health care industry, but continues to permit such deductions for egregious salaries paid elsewhere in the economy.

Currently, publicly held corporations can effectively deduct unlimited amounts of executive compensation from their federal corporate income tax returns. Although Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code purports to limit such deductions to $1,000,000 annually per executive, Section 162(m)(4) contains a loophole large enough to sail a mega-yacht through: Deductions are still allowed for any "performance based" pay, no matter how high.

The Internal Revenue Service has interpreted 162(m)(4) to allow almost any compensation plan to pass muster, even when executive compensation is tied to comically low performance metrics. Thus, Section 162(m) has become largely a dead letter; unlimited amounts of executive compensation can be structured as performance-based and therefore deducted for federal income tax purposes.

The current Senate health care bill seeks to revive Section162(m) by removing the "performance based" exceptions. However, the bill applies only to corporate salaries paid to health insurance executives, not to compensation for employees in any other industry.

Under the bill, health insurance companies would only be able to deduct compensation below $500,000 (or, under a pending amendment by Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, $400,000). More importantly, health insurance companies would be denied the Section 162(m)(4) loophole for performance-based pay. These insurance companies could still pay their executives large amounts, but taxpayer money would no longer subsidize such salaries via corporate income tax deductions.

Unfortunately, the Senate Democrats' decision to target only the compensation paid to insurance executives belies an unwillingness to address the broader issue at hand: the taxpayer's subsidy of excessive executive compensation via tax deductions. There is no persuasive rationale for limiting the deductibility of health insurance executives' pay, while allowing every other industry to continue using the 162(m)(4) exception to deduct unlimited compensation characterized as performance-based pay.

Targeting the executive pay of health care insurance executives is like going after AA baseball players for steroid abuse: Everyone knows that's not where the real action is. Today's Gordon Geckos are not flocking to the health insurance industry.

There is no persuasive argument for disallowing the deductibility the salaries health insurance executives receive while permitting every other corporation effectively unlimited deductions for executive compensation. At best, supporters of the Senate bill argue that such limits will help "encourage health insurance companies to put premium dollars toward lower rates and more affordable coverage, not in the pocketbooks of their executives." However, the proposed changes will do nothing substantial to address health care costs, since executive compensation is a minuscule fraction of such costs.

Consider Senator Blanche Lincoln's amendment lowering the deduction maximum for insurers from $500,000 to $400,000. Senator Lincoln estimates this would result in a savings of approximately $0.25 per U.S. citizen per year. Unless playing Ms. Pacman counts as health insurance, such savings will not have a material impact on premiums.

The current bill's treatment of executive compensation is political grandstanding at its most troubling: Senators can crow about decreasing taxpayer subsidization of excessive executive compensation in the health insurance industry, while leaving the taxpayer subsidy of excessive compensation firmly intact everywhere else.

That's patently unhealthy.

CJ's Opinion: The populace and the politicians are screaming about outlandish executive compensation packages while doing absolutely nothing to curb their excesses. That's because limiting executive pay is not the American Way - our extreme American form of laissez faire Capitalism does not permit limits on income.

But the politicians are focusing on the wrong problem. The real problem is that corporate executives are not shouldering their fair share of the burden of providing for America's system of government; their compensation is extremely disproportionate to their tax liability.

The top income earners throughout the 1970s paid about 70% of their earnings back to the American people in the form of taxes; that was down from about 90% during the 1950s. The top income earners today pay about 35% of their earnings back to the American people in taxes.

If a person lives in a nation having the type of government system that affords him/her the opportunity to earn vast sums of money, then it's only fair that he should shoulder his fair share of the tax burden. If a corporate executive wants to pay himself $100 million per year, then he (and it's almost always a 'he') should have no problem providing $70 million dollars to support the American system that provides him with the ability to earn that kind of money.

The amount of earnings that would fall under the top income tax bracket can be negotiated. But if the politicians want to curb corporate excess, the only way to achieve that goal without compromising American Capitalistic ideals is to raise taxes on the top income earners. There should be no limits on executive compensation, but it is only fair that they should pay a proportionate amount of their wealth to support the American system of government that allows them to prosper.

12-06 Republican Flat-Earthers

2009-12-06T16:45:00.000-06:00

12-06 Republican Flat-Earthers
Gordon Brown: climate-change sceptics are 'flat-earthers'
By James Kirkup and Louise Gray
04 December 2009

Climate sceptics around the world are using the crisis to argue that man made global warming is not proven and therefore there is no need for a deal to curb greenhouse gas emissions or pay to help poor countries adapt.

In the US, the controversy has prompted leading global warming sceptics in the Republican Party to call for hearings in Congress, in a bid to thwart Barack Obama’s plans for energy reform.

They hope to hold the hearings before the president arrives in Copenhagen on next week for his solo appearance at the international climate talks, where he will offer to cut US emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Senator James Inhofe, the senior Republican on the environment and public works committee, has already launched investigation into the emails and called for academics in the US who had communicated with Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the row, to keep any relevant emails and documents.

“This idea that some of the science is being manipulated and some scientists are not being heard is our biggest fear,” Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Sen. Inhofe said.

More here.

CJ's Opinion: Funny how every single Conservative Republican in the US is a climate skeptic. I understand there are a lot of ignorant flat-earthers out there, but the majority of people have finally come to understand that the earth is round. Considering that a substantial majority of Americans understand that climate change is not a hoax and that well over half support cap and trade legislation, you'd think that at least a few Republicans would have the intelligence and the common sense to see reason.

But no. Not a single Republican supports legislation to help mitigate the catastrophic consequences of global climate change. Could it be that they are all incredibly stupid? I don't think so. It's pretty obvious to me that Conservative Republicans are far more interested in supporting Big Oil and Big Coal than in doing the right thing for the health of our planet and the people who live here. They're far more interested in cheap energy prices for business owners and low fuel prices for their stupid flat-earther constituents than preventing world-wide calamity.

I could understand and accept a majority of Republicans being against climate change - after all, there are several Democrats who don't support cap and trade - but every single one?! This just proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Conservative Republicans are not reasonable human beings that are capable of acting in a conscientious manner, and have no business being in positions of leadership. Conservative Republicans care only about themselves and their filthy money. Republicans are fucking evil!

12-05 Freedom Fighters Aren't Stupid

2009-12-05T19:57:00.000-06:00

Little resistance on day 2 of US-Afghan offensive
By Deb Riechmann
December 5, 2009

KABUL – U.S. Marines and Afghan troops have killed at least seven Taliban fighters during the first U.S.-led offensive since President Barack Obama announced a new American war plan this week, Afghan officials said Saturday.

American and Afghan troops have met little resistance since Operation Cobra's Anger was launched Friday to disrupt Taliban supply and communications lines in the strategic Now Zad Valley of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, Marine officials said.

About 1,000 Marines and 150 Afghan troops are taking part in the offensive, including hundreds of Marines dropped behind Taliban lines by helicopters and MV-22 Osprey aircraft. A second, larger Marine force pushed northward from the Marines' main base.

More here.

CJ's Opinion: Well, Duh! A thousand US Marines coming toward a ragtag group of resistance fighters and you expect them to stand and fight? Hello?! Did the French/Polish/Italian Resistance fighters stand and fight the invading Germans? The Afghanis may be backward and uncivilized but that doesn't make them stupid. All they have to do is bury their assault weapons in the sand and sit down in the shade to become unarmed civilians; they can stand and fight another day when they have the advantage.

Whatcha gonna do? Kill em all and let god sort em out? Fucking moron Americans!

12-05 Nothing is Ever Clear

2009-12-05T03:19:00.000-06:00

A plan in need of clarity
By Jim Webb
December 4, 2009

I have great regard for the careful process the Obama administration employed in its efforts to define a new approach for the long-standing military commitment in Afghanistan and to put an operational framework in place for our responsible withdrawal. I intend, nevertheless, to continue to call on the administration to clarify to the American public and Congress how it defines success and how we reach an end point.

Since early 2009, I have said repeatedly that the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan must proceed based on four considerations: (1) the fragility of the Afghan government; (2) whether building a national army of considerable scale is achievable; (3) whether an increased U.S. military presence will ultimately have a positive effect in the country, or whether we will be seen as an occupying force; and (4) the linkage of events in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the coming weeks I intend to examine the administration's plan to see how it addresses these criteria and how it will affect our troops.

Since the president's address Tuesday, there has been much discussion of the date that the United States will begin to draw down military forces and transfer security responsibility. Just as important is a focus on creating the conditions to enable this transfer of responsibility. The administration has not defined them with sufficient clarity. Our strategy is sound only if framed with clearly defined and attainable goals, an understandable end point and a regional perspective. We must also avoid the inherent risks of allowing our success in Afghanistan to be defined by events that are largely beyond our control.

When U.S. troops entered Afghanistan in 2001, no true central government had existed in that country since 1979. The agreements reached in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001 led to a new constitution, an interim government and the national election of 2004. The agreements also gave considerable power to a central government in a country that is very disparate and historically far removed from the concept of central governance. The result today is a weak, fragile government in Kabul whose power on paper is far greater than in reality. It is plagued by a lack of capacity and rampant corruption. Many observers say that power needs to be devolved to a more decentralized form of governance consistent with tribal realities to achieve the Afghan government's long-term viability.

More here.

CJ's Opinion: If you seek clarity you won't find it - nothing is ever clear - not in government and certainly not in any wars.

However, I'm a bit amazed that anyone will publicly admit that Afghanis are merely backward tribal groups that lack modern concepts of governance - I thought it was only me who believed that. I see pictures of Afghanis and they appear to be not much more advanced than 18th century American Indians. We had to virtually annihilate indigenous Americans to defeat them - they wouldn't stop fighting until they were on the verge of extinction.

Since I don't believe genocide on that scale is a viable option in Afghanistan, it's pretty clear that we don't stand much of a chance of winning a war over there. As a matter of fact, the far more brutal Soviet army didn't have much luck either, so I don't see how a bunch of pissed off American soldiers will fare any better, regardless of how well-trained or well-equipped they are.

But if you want clarity then read my blog entry from October - that's the most clarity you're likely to get.

12-04 Liberal Thieves

2009-12-04T16:39:00.000-06:00

Dems push TARP money for jobs bill
By Jake Sherman & Meredith Shiner
December 4, 2009

Unemployment numbers were down today, but congressional Democrats are still scraping for job creation ideas, including using repaid Wall Street bailout funds to pay for a two-part jobs bill House leaders hope to bring to the floor before the end of the year.

The Troubled Asset Recovery Program funds would be used to pay for not only an extension of unemployment insurance but also transportation and infrastructure projects. House leaders are discussing attaching this jobs bill to an omnibus appropriations bill.

Democrats - especially in hard-hit states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island - are eager for the TARP funds.

“I think we use [the TARP funds] for the most significant issue of the moment, a crisis equally compelling as the credit crisis and the financial crisis that involved the financial markets last year,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

Republicans have decried the idea of using bailout funds for a jobs bill, calling TARP a slush fund.

“TARP funds borrowed from the taxpayer should not become a slush fund for the political whims of Washington,” said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.). “The TARP was passed last fall because most experts believed that our capital markets were on the verge of absolute collapse.”

Democrats are considering several ideas as part of a jobs package. They must extend safety-net measures such as COBRA and unemployment assistance but are unsure if the extension will be for six months or a year. That measure, which Democrats say is an emergency measure, will most likely cost around $100 billion.

The transportation and infrastructure idea is a bit more complicated. It’s expected to cost around $70 billion and would also include small-business assistance. The logical place to attach this measure would be the must-pass omnibus appropriations bill, but it is unclear if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) can cull the 60 votes needed to pass that measure on the already-thick omnibus.

Reid would face serious opposition from Republican senators if he tried to tap any bailout money for a jobs bill.

“TARP authority should only be used to prevent dire and irrevocable harm to our financial system and credit markets that provide liquidity for businesses and consumers - it was not designed to be used like rainy-day cash to throw around at any problem,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.).

But Democrats are lining up with ideas for how to use the TARP money.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) is hoping for investments in green jobs using the funds. Speaking to reporters Friday, she singled out a factory in New Hampshire that is transitioning from producing printing presses to wind turbines. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said he wants the transportation projects in the bill to fix the country’s “decrepit” roads system.

But even if the TARP is spent to create jobs, it is not likely to fully please every Democratic constituency. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) is the leading proponent of the so-called cash for caulkers program - meant to retrofit houses for energy efficiency. It’s likely to create 600,000 to 850,000 jobs. House leadership said this idea is not likely to end up in immediate jobs legislation.

CJ's Opinion: How dare those ungrateful liberal bastards try to use our Conservative Corporate Welfare money to pay for a middle class jobs initiative! How dare those greedy cretins try to spend their own tax money on themselves! That TARP money belongs to the wealthy Wall Street tycoons who own this country! We gave them the money with no strings attached and we will not spend it to help those low-life, unproductive American workers!

Are there no prisons?! Are there no workhouses?! If they can't find a job then they deserve to live on the streets and beg for charity! That TARP money belongs to the rich - not to the working people who must pay for it!

12-04 Hoosiers Against Healthcare

2009-12-04T05:44:00.000-06:00

After Visclosky's health care vote, I'll vote for Leyva
Letter to the Editor
December 4, 2009

Debra Hopkins, Schererville: It is apparent that Rep. Pete Visclosky doesn't understand the definition of the word "represent" nor the duties of his office.

Let me help you. Represent means to stand for a symbol, sign or expression of something. That is Pete's job.

National polls continually show the majority of Americans do not want government taking over our health care. Visclosky assumed he is smarter than this majority. He dissented instead of represented and voted for the health care bill. And in case you don't understand the definition of dissented, it means differed in opinion. That is note Pete's job. Therefore, that makes him Dissenter Visclosky instead of Representative Visclosky. That is not what we voted for. We will not forget this, ever.

There will be another name on the ballot in 2010, and it will read Mark Leyva. He will get my vote and hopefully the votes of all who prefer representation instead of dissension.

CJ's Opinion: Debra, I hope you get the representation you demand. I hope you die for lack of adequate healthcare. I hope your children die for lack of healthcare. You're just another ignorant Hoosier who would gleefully stand by and do nothing while thousands of people suffer and die needlessly. You are a vile excuse for a human being and deserve to suffer the fate you would bestow upon others. Do the world a favor and die quickly, Debra.

12-04 Shallow Conservative Ideals

2009-12-04T03:44:00.001-06:00

Mr. President, here's how to lift our economy
By Mitt Romney
December 3, 2009

Mitt Romney's 10-point plan

To get people back to work as rapidly as possible and to restore America's economic vitality, the nation must change course. Here's the advice I would give:

• Repair the stimulus. Freeze the funds that haven't yet been spent and redirect them to immediate, private sector job-creation priorities.

CJ's Translation: Give more welfare money to the wealthy so it can trickle down to the rest of us.

• Create tax incentives that promote business expansion and hiring. For example, install a robust investment tax credit, permit businesses to expense capital purchases made in 2010, and reduce payroll taxes. These will reignite construction, technology and a wide array of capital goods industries, and lead to expanded employment.

CJ's Translation: Cut taxes for the wealthy so the rest of us will be forced to pay for their corporate welfare.

• Prove to the global investors that finance America's debt that we are serious about reining in spending and becoming fiscally prudent by adopting limits on non-military discretionary spending and reforming our unsustainable, unfunded entitlements. These are key to strengthening the dollar, reducing the threat of rampant inflation and holding down interest rates.

CJ's Translation: Cut social services for the less fortunate while continuing to fund brave new wars that further enrich those who are wealthy.

• Close down any talk of carbon cap-and-trade. It will burden consumers and employers with billions in new costs. Instead, greatly expand our commitment to natural gas and nuclear, boosting jobs now and reducing the export of energy jobs and dollars later.

CJ's Translation: Global warming is a myth - drill baby drill.

• Tell the unions that job-stifling "card check" legislation is off the table. Laying new burdens on small business will kill entrepreneurship and job creation.

CJ's Translation: Continue to crush American workers so we can enjoy cheap labor and grow wealthier at their expense.

• Don't allow a massive tax increase to go into effect in 2011 with the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. The specter of more tax-fueled government spending and the reduction of capital available for small business will hinder investment and business expansion.

CJ's Translation: Lock in permanent tax cuts for the rich - they are entitled to keep the lion's share of America's wealth.

• New spending should be strictly limited to items that are critically needed and that we would have acquired in the future, such as new military equipment to support our troops abroad and essential infrastructure at home.

CJ's Translation: Build bigger war machines and little else.

• Install dynamic regulations for the financial sector — rules that are up to date, efficient and not excessively burdensome. But do not so tie up the financial sector with red tape that we lose a vital component of our economic system.

CJ's Translation: Cut red tape for Wall Street bankers so they can more easily strip the nation of wealth.

• Open the doors to trade. Give important friends like Colombia favored trade status rather than bow to protectionist demands. Now is the time for aggressive pursuit of opportunities for new markets for American goods, not insular retrenchment.

CJ's Translation: Ship even more jobs to foreign countries to break the backs of American workers.

• Stop frightening the private sector by continuing to hold GM stock, by imposing tighter and tighter controls on compensation, and by pursuing a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers. Government encroachment on free enterprise is depressing investment and job creation.

CJ's Translation: Allow American auto companies to fail, preserve the massive bonuses for Wall Street bankers, and allow millions of Americans to suffer and die needlessly so that health insurance companies may prosper at our expense.

CJ's Opinion: These Conservative Pigs are utterly predictable; they won't be happy until the wealthy have it all and the rest of us are left begging. They are blatantly fleecing our nation and most Americans are too stupid to see it. Stupid people deserve what they get!