Fiting RadRite Loons, Again. Last Friday I spent many hours reading thru and answering the crazies on an AOL story about President Obama's basketball injury. The vile, racist trash that AOL permits is inexcusable. And a little coterie of Radical Right loons treats AOL comments boards as their own private chatroom for racist and insanely childish and irrelevant matters, including personal taunts and inside jokes that have no place on a public comments area. Comments there are supposed to be, according to AOL's Terms of Service (TOS) dedicated to a particular story and matters that can reasonably be regarded as related to it. I posted many remarks to try to rein in the discussion and rebuke the people who use comments areas as personal chatrooms, for wasting other people's time. The moderators were apparently off duty.
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I left comments of substance on a number of topics, and present below the 33 most important comments. Many of them make pointed replies to the viciousness and stupidity of the Radical Right. Liberals may find some of this argumentation useful in their own run-ins with Radical Rightists, online or in person.


All Obama has to do to END the deficits is raise taxes on the rich. Quick, simple fix that hurts no one, because the rich are SO rich they don't know what to do with their money. As my brother, who was a millionaire before his divorce, has said, "Beyond a certain point, money is just a way to keep score." Let the rich keep score by how many teachers' or soldiers' or police officers' salaries they pay; how many miles of highways they repair; how many of their fellow Americans they keep from dying because they don't have health insurance; and on and on thru all the many things that decent people want their money used for, not a 14th house, 21st car, 49th Armani suit, or 1,401st pair of shoes.
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B.C. (apt abbreviation, as in caveman era, 30,000 B.C.), kindly stop regurgitating the same tired, ridiculous talking points from Karl Rove. We've heard all that noise before, and it didn't stop the PEOPLE from voting Obama into the White House. As for North Korea, it cannot presently even remotely reach us with nukes, even if it does actually have them, something no one outside N.K. knows for sure. We could probably destroy ALL of N.K.'s military capability without breaking a sweat, with a new "shock and awe" campaign of two or three weeks' duration. The pretense that we are "stretched thin" is Pentagon b.s. to steal ever more money from taxpayers. We have 1.2 MILLION people under arms, and our Iraq and Afghanistan commitments TOGETHER don't amount to more than a small proportion of total U.S. forces. But if fools and weaklings let things go long enuf, N.K. may just have time enuf to perfect rockets that can carry nuclear warheads to every part of the United States. So how long do you want us to wait before confronting N.K. and destroying its capacity to nuke us?
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Cheney shot a friend in the FACE, not derriere. People who have health insurance ALWAYS seek medical care for a serious injury. The people who can't AFFORD health insurance are the ones who suffer permanent injury or scarring, and President Obama doesn't want anyone to have to go thru life with a horrible scar on his face from an injury. No, he wants them to get the care they need to recover with as small a scar as possible. But the Radical Right wants them to take months to recover from an injury that 12 little stitches could help them recover from in two weeks. And the Radical Right wants poor people to have conspicuous scars on their face, marring their lives ever afterward, while the rich get plastic surgery to get rid of WRINKLES. I am proud to stand with Obama's heart on healthcare, tho the bill he let Republican obstructionism produce is a monstrosity that must be improved. SINGLE-PAYER, now!
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I guess you don't understand economics. Free-market economies always have swings. Republicans have been notoriously responsible for grave economic downturns: Hoover saw the start of the Great Depression. Most of Reagan's first term was a recession. The Great Recession we have not yet recovered from started under Bush the Younger. If the Republicans had their way, not only would the unemployed not have jobs, but they would also not even have Unemployment insurance, and their children would have to beg for charity from the rich.
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Liberals have honor, and don't issue racist slanders to misrepresent Radical Rightists. As for Allen West, whoever that is, essentially nobody has ever heard of him. Regarding Obama's character, I have not seen him attack his opponents but reach out across the aisle again and again to try to accomplish good things for the Nation, only to be kicked in the teeth again and again. What Obama is missing is not character but backbone. If he were even 1/10 as indignant for us as he should be, and slammed the Radical Right as the racist and antihuman slime they are, the Democrats would have passed single-payer healthcare and won the midterm elections with a huge increase in both houses of Congress.
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Marcy..., Bush attacked a country that never attacked us and killed, directly and thru the chaos that the removal of Saddam produced, 1.25 MILLION Iraqi deaths. We are indignant that less than 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11. How would we have liked to be invaded by a Moslem army that killed 1.25 MILLION Americans -- except that the U.S. has 10 times the population of Iraq, so to be proportionate, a Moslem invasion of the U.S. would have to kill 12.5 million Americans. So Bush was honorable, was he, even tho he sanctioned torture that the FBI said was NEVER necessary, and disgraced us in the world. You are delusional. None of the leadership of the present-day Republican Party has any honor at all. ALL of them are war criminals, and should be arrested if ever they travel to Europe, subjected to war-crimes trials, and dropped thru a trap door with a noose around their neck. Bush has already been warned: don't travel to Britain. All Republicans who were in on the lies and backed the invasion of Iraq should be held to account for their crimes -- as should everyone, like you, who makes excuses for those hideous crimes that have stained this Nation's honor in blood.
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OMG. Marcy... wrote something sensible. Did she actually sign off and someone else seize that name? In any case, the movie was "The MOUSE That Roared". Alas, there is no world community capable of or willing to address situations like North Korea, and the Radical Right doesn't want to strengthen the United Nations, which was designed to stop wars and stand up for human rights. So, absent a strong UN, it is the U.S. that everyone turns to. We SHOULD be able to turn to Communist China, which is next to that lunatic North Korean regime, to tell the Kims to stop the madness or CHINA will invade, AGAINST N.K. this time. But we can't count on China, can we? The UN can't count on China, nor Russia, which also adjoins N.K. The WORLD can't count on China, or Russia, or the EU, or UN. It all comes back to us, because the Radical Right won't let us create powerful international, multilateral institutions to deal with precisely the kind of problems that North Korea poses. So we CAN'T just sit on the sidelines and watch -- thanks to the Radical Right's United Nations bugaboo.
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No, the comments against Obama are an active, concerted attempt by absolutely unrepresentative un-Americans to coopt comments areas for Radical Right propaganda. Decent, sensible people see the hate-filled rants and leave. Liberals need instead to fite back, here as elsewhere, and answer the lies. There is NOTHING about Obama's programs that is the slitest "socialist", and people who throw around that term have absolutely no idea what it means -- in large measure because they are uneducated yahoos who don't know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx.
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randy, seek professional help. Marcy..., the Iraq attack was about ISRAEL -- nothing else. Iraq was Israel's only credible enemy, so the Zionist lobby insisted the U.S. destroy it. Now Iran is Israel's only credible enemy, so the same traitors are advocating we attack Iran. The oil excuse doesn't make any sense. We don't get oil for FREE. We have to pay for it, no matter where it comes from. As for poppies, the U.S. could perfectly well grow all the poppies the pharmaceutical industry has any legitimate need for, and benefit American farmers. It is the TALIBAN, not CIA, that pushes drugs to fund its malicious works.
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Bush never ran ANYTHING. He was an absentee owner of his ranch, and played at clearing brush, while ranch hands did the real work. I'd like to see Bush take on Obama on the basketball court. Do you imagine that Bush would triumph? Basketball is Obama's game; baseball may have been Bush's -- he did, after all, own a pro baseball team, so we would expect him to know something about that game. Even George Bush the Younger knew a few things. Not enuf to be President, of course, but he was never really President, only a puppet whose strings were pulled by the Real President, a collective leadership of mostly unknown people but two whose names we did know, Karl Rove and, above all, Dick Cheney. How good was the Real President at sports?
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Obama is a multi-millionaire. Does zaccinc REALLY think the multi-millionaire Obama hates capitalism?
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No one person "runs the country". The Federal Government is some 12 million strong, including government contractors. The bulk of the work of the Government is done by the executive departments, run day-to-day by Cabinet Secretaries. But the country is much more than the Federal Government, and it is run by millions of different people doing different things, including running their own small business. The people who work ridiculous numbers of hours don't do so because they want to but because they can't afford to have other people help. The President has LOTS of help. His role is to set policy and reconcile differences among advisers. For clearness of judgment, a person needs to vary his activities and get some recreation and perspective. Of course, if you want someone so overworked that he can't think clearly, that's your choice. It is not mine.
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Not just this comments area but many, many more are infested by the Radical Right, because that tiny proportion of the country is intent on making people think they are much more numerous than in fact they are. So they land hard on comments areas, leave thousands of malicious, extremely short comments, all conforming to the current talking points, and drive everyone else away with their disgusting and hate-filled rhetoric. Liberals need to answer the lies and denounce the hate. But decent people detest lowering themselves into the muck that the Radical Right spews.
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Yes, the Tea Party extremists who speak of the "original Constitution" are loons. The Bill of Rights wasn't part of the original Constitution. And some of them want to take away birthright citizenship. So how would anyone achieve citizenship if birth in the U.S. didn't count? If it doesn't count for people now, it couldn't count for people six generations ago, and NO ONE would be a natural-born citizen.
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Everything good in this country -- including ESTABLISHING this country -- was done by Liberals. Conservatives, starting with the Tories and proceeding to the Confederates and now on to the RadRite Republicans and Tea Partiers, have always fought progress -- and always lost.
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A church in Iraq PROVES the tolerance of Islam. Islam took over Mesopotamia, and changed its name to Iraq, by 636 A.D. -- 1,374 years ago. Yet there are still Christians in Iraq. There are still Christians in Egypt, conquered in 640 A.D. There are still Christians in Lebanon, conquered around 636 A.D. So much for Islam being "super intolerant". Does the Radical Right know anything about history?
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Race has EVERYTHING to do with the intense, extremely irrational hatred of Obama we see everywhere on AOL comments boards. No other explanation works.
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Alas, isolationism is not viable. The issue is not military bases as such, but whether the U.S. was ASKED IN.
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The rich think it all ultimately works out to their advantage, because the bulk of people are rendered miserable, and nothing makes the rich so happy as seeing other people miserable. It also works to their economic advantage to make people so desperate that they will take huge cuts in wages and benefits, so more and more of the price of the goods and services they perform for the owners of the business will go into the pockets of the owners, not the people who actually do the work. But the rich are stupid, because that kind of behavior tends to create REVOLUTIONS in which the furious, impoverished working people KILL the rich. We need a statue of a guillotine on the National Mall in Washington, and at Broad Street and Wall Street in New York to remind people of what happens to people who try to crush the poor.
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Ah, there it is, the real object of the Republican Radical Right: impeachment. Not possible, tho. You tried it with Clinton, over trivia and intrusion into his sex life, which had NOTHING to do with his oath of office. You'll try it with Obama, and fail even worse. And Obama isn't going to any Moslem country. He's an American, and relatively few Americans move abroad. Esp. few American Christians move to Moslem countries. And it is 'people' who talk such claptrap that are the real traitors. But keep talking your open racism and religious bigotry, Rightwingers. Americans need to hear (or read) every ugly word of it.
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You can't mediate with the Radical Right. They are absolutists: absolutely wrong, absolutely hateful, absolutely devoid of the democratic spirit of compromise and cooperation. Obama kept reaching out to them, and they kept leading him farther and farther from what the people who elected him wanted, and then the Radical Right voted against the very bills they insisted Obama write. They are pure evil, and must be crushed, not accommodated.
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The Radical Right always wants to talk about their nonexistent God (pro) and Obama (con). They will drag into any conversation whichever is NOT the topic. And yes, O.M.L., we DO expect you not to respond to off-topic comments. Just say, plainly, that is OFF-TOPIC and we won't discuss this here.
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Off-topic. But I got a free English-language Koran "Compliments of The Council of American-Islamic Relations" (www.cair.com), and it's a very big book -- 1,164 pages, with many explicatory notes. I think it does contain the totality of the Koran. In any event, Obama is a Christian, so Islam is entirely off-topic.
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12 stitches is not trivial. A bandaid won't suffice. And your trivializing the President's injury does not make it trivial. To the extent that pain distracts him at a time when North Korea is straining for a fite is not good news. And if he takes a painkiller that has psychoactive effects, that could be even worse in time of international tension. So this story is really not as trifling as it might at first appear.
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What did Obama do to stop the export of manufacturing? He promoted legislation to end a tax loophole that actually encourages U.S. corporations to send jobs to China -- but the REPUBLICANS blocked it! The Democrats MUST make sure that that measure passes before the present Congress adjourns. As for NAFTA, it was bipartisan, negotiated by Bush the Elder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nafta#Negotiation_and_ratification) and ratified under Clinton. It was designed, among other things, to PREVENT a flood of Mexican economic refugees across our southern border. It does NOT include Communist China. Free trade/globalization is an insane plot by the rich and super-rich to pit American workers against Chinese, to force Americans to accept ever lower wages and ever worse working conditions, on the theory that the purpose of free enterprise is to victimize the great majority for the benefit of the tiny minority. Free trade is an ENEMY of the United States, and all its advocates are guilty of economic TREASON. If Canada and Mexico want free access to our market, they can join the Union as a bunch of states, and pay all the prices that the current states paid when they consented to form a Federal union. If they refuse annexation, they proclaim plainly that they don't WANT access to our market. In or out, but not half-in and half-out.
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27% [of Americans are "birthers"], according to CNN in August. 27% of Americans overall is not actually reflective of the reality. It is mostly Radical Right Republicans, and more 'men' than women. They are the racists, who will seize on anything to justify their hatred of the Big Black Boss in the White House, and the mentally deficient and uneducated. That's about the percentage (somewhere between 25% and 35%) of neo-Confederates in the Nation. They are the recalcitrant albatross around our national neck that has been with us since the Union destroyed the Confederacy -- because we didn't sterilize Johnny Reb as we should have.
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If you want to hear from ordinary people, this is assuredly not the place. Rightwing crazies have made it their life's work to haunt AOL comments boards and vilify all decent people. AOL allows them to hijack discussions off to wildly irrelevant topics, carry on private conversations in a public area, and otherwise drive sane and reasonable people away, so they can claim victory once they are only talking to themselves. Liberals and moderates need to report them to AOL and hope that the slanderers and topic hijackers are given the boot.
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So do you guys get some kind of Rightwing Crazies Newsletter with the day's talking points?
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The fact that these people dare to say the outrageous things they do proves that they don't believe them for a minute, because he could have them sent to Guantanamo, or off to some "rendition" country. As for the suggestion that the President of the United States has less power than Pelosi or Reid, the person who made that claim has plainly never had so much as a single political-science course at the college level.
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Michael, the Nazis were FASCISTS, not socialists. They went to WAR against the Communist Soviet Union, which proudly called itself "Socialist". The mere fact that the word "Socialist" was in the name of the Nazi Party means nothing. Fox News has the word "News" in it. Do yourself a favor and look up "Socialism" and "Fascism" -- and "Communism", for good measure -- in Wikipedia and learn what they mean.
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STOP talking about people not mentioned in the article or logically connected with the article at issue. When I leave, I will just leave, with good manners, and not call attention to that fact. There's only so much time I care to waste on my inferiors. I have tried to contribute to a discussion of the ideas raised here, so that grownups who stop by aren't left at a complete, amazed loss to understand how an article about a basketball injury became a playpen for obscene, racist children.
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The Capitol and Pentagon are still standing, so were never blown up. The Pentagon was damaged on 9/11 (because Bush didn't tell passengers they must not let their plane be hijacked), but not by the Weather Underground. And the Weather Underground did NOT kill three people. Check Wikipedia. Obama was much too young to "associate himself with a terrorist" from the Weather Underground, and the man you are referring to was NOT a "terrorist" but education reformer when Obama encountered him. But of what importance is the truth to the Radical Right? None.
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I don't think McCain chose Palin. He was running behind, and the same Invisible Hand that chose Dubya, the collective but nameless leadership of the Republican Party, offered him their indispensable backing on the condition that he accept their choice for Vice President: Palin. McCain scarcely met her before he agreed to that condition. I'm sure he now rues the day he let himself be pushed to raise her to national prominence -- esp. since she helped lose the White House for him.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,429 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:27 PM

 
Don't "Reform" the Filibuster. Destroy It. Keith Olbermann on the cable public-affairs program Countdown November 15th discussed with Chris Hayes of The Nation magazine proposals to reduce the number of votes needed to end a filibuster. I was, as usual, disgusted that Olbermann and Hayes did not simply say that the filibuster is unconstitutional and can be ended by any Vice President. So I sent the following message via email to The Nation's website.

(PLEASE PASS this on to Christopher Hayes, for whom I see no direct email address. Thank you.)

I saw you on the November 15th edition of MSNBC's Countdown talking about reforming the filibuster, and do not understand why people do not simply say what is perfectly obvious: it is unconstitutional to convert the U.S. Senate to minority rule. The Constitution is very clear about which matters require a supermajority in the Senate, and states what the requisite supermajority is. Ordinary legislation does NOT, in the Constitution, require a supermajority. Procedural votes do not require a supermajority. What the Constitution does not permit, it forbids. The Framers plainly intended that aside from the few items expressly mentioned (for instance, ratification of treaties or override of a Presidential veto), the Congress is always to operate by simple majority: 50% + 1.

Since there is no permission for the Senate ever to operate by supermajority except for the few enumerated situations for which the Constitution provides for a supermajority, the President of the Senate — the Vice President of the United States — need do nothing more to end the filibuster as an institution than to rule that if a simple majority for procedural votes or legislative votes has been reached, the measure passes. Period.

The current President of the Senate under the Constitution is Joe Biden. And all he has to do is rule at the end of every vote that passes by a simple majority that the measure has passed. End of discussion. The Framers gave the Executive Branch the power to ride herd on the Congress when it doesn't behave. The President can adjourn a Congress that can't agree when to adjourn. The President can call Congress back from recess. The Vice President can end the filibuster. Very simple. So why isn't it done? Because the self-important Beltway elite, that "Washington" that the Tea Party uses as a pejorative, has decided that majority rule is wrong, and instead, the minority is to control. The Framers disagree. The Constitution they wrote, which is supposedly still in force, does not permit minority rule.

Cordially, L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman, Expansionist Party of the United States, Newark, NJ (http://www.expansionistparty.org; XPUS[on]aol.com)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:01 AM

 
The Poison Pills in Obamacare. Barack Obama's sad need to be loved by everybody, which derives from his biracial family background and his determination to win over everybody on both sides of the (racial, and now political) divide, caused him to compromise away the essence of a law to create universal healthcare. He surrendered — not compromised: surrendered — on single-payer coverage paid for from general revenues thru increased taxes on the rich and super-rich. He surrendered on "public option". Then he accepted two poison pills. The lesser was taxing "Cadillac" health plans — reducing some people's healthcare benefits to fund other people's. But the far worse poison pill was the individual mandate, forcing people to buy insurance from private companies even if they don't want to. That is plainly unconstitutional, and hugely unpopular. He then compounded these two substantive poison pills with a third, procedural poison pill, pushing off the effective date of the change to 2014, well after he could rely on a Democratic Congress. Unsurprisingly, he will already have lost a dominantly Democratic Congress, in large part BECAUSE of his poisonous healthcare plan, by 2011!
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You really have to ask, "Was Obama ever sincere about wanting universal healthcare, or was it all a charade?"
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Plainly poison should not be part of a healthcare plan. But Obama put three poison pills into his bill. The Supreme Court is very likely to find that the Federal Government does NOT have the authority to compel private persons to spend their private, after-tax moneys they do not wish to spend, on insurance placed with private companies that they do wish to do business with. Obama knew the Supreme Court is controlled by Republican Conservatives, yet he inserted a provision that is almost certain to be voided by that very Court.
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Then what? Does the Court sever the individual-mandate portion of the law from other, constitutionally unobjectionable parts, which then are permitted to take effect? Or does the Court void the entire law on the basis that a central provision is unconstitutional? — as it plainly is. Many state attorneys-general have filed a suit to void the universal mandate provision. I don't know if they wish to have that provision severed from other provisions, or to have the entire law voided.
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If the entire law is struck down, it's back to Square One. Great.
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But maybe this time we'll do things right, and push for single–payer financed by higher taxes on the obscenely rich, so we can rejoin the civilized world. Republicans will fite that, but the PEOPLE want it. If Obama goes to the people — who might have lost the popular provisions that have already gone into effect, so be fiting mad — and refuses to compromise, but takes it to the electorate in 2012 (long before the main features of the insanely bad healthcare bill was to have gone into effect), he might win re-election and a massively Democratic new Congress.
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If he does not fite for us, and the Democrats do not fite for us, we will continue to have 45,000 Americans dying each year from lack of health insurance, and 45- to 50 million Americans being sicker and weaker than they should be because they do not get healthcare. (It is not true that everyone gets healthcare, as thru emergency rooms. Tens of millions of people suffer illness or injuries they should be treated for.)
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This is a very sad time in human history, when the United States has turned its back on progress and let the worst of us get the best of us.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:01 AM

 
Email to Senator Schumer. I am ticked off at Senator Charles ("Chuck") Schumer of New York for proposing to raise the cutoff for tax-cut renewal to $1 million. So I sent him this note via feedback form at his website today.

Are you out of your mind? You JUMP from letting taxes rise on people who make $250,000 a year, to letting them rise only on people who make over a MILLION dollars a year? Why would you make such a huge jump as a first step?

$250,000 a YEAR — year after year — is already an awful lot of money. For one thing, it's a lot more than your U.S. Senate salary! It is also 17X what I get from Social Security — with no COLA increase for two years! The income tax rate on people in the highest bracket in 1978 was on the order of 78%. So why would you think that letting it rise to 39% is a hardship now? We had plenty of rich people in 1978. What we did NOT have is a distribution of wealth like the worst Latin American oligarchy, which we do have now. And each year it gets worse, as YOU blithely let the rich steal more and more money from the poor and middle class.

Simple negotiation mandates that you give NOTHING as your first bargaining move. You don't QUADRUPLE the present figure. Don't you have anyone in business around you to tell you that? My brother wrote a book, _Negotiate to Win: Gaining the Psychological Edge_, that you or someone on your staff might read: http://www.amazon.com/Negotiate-Win-Gaining-Psychological-Edge/dp/0136113850. But NOBODY opens by quadrupling the current figure.

It's this kind of weakness of will on the part of Liberals that caused the Democrats' midterm "shellacking", as Liberal voters saw NO DIFFERENCE between Republicans and Democrats important enuf to get them to vote. (We can talk about compulsory voting some other time.) If you sell us out again, you will see even fewer Democrats in Congress — and probably the White House — in 2012.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:47 PM

 
Fiting Tax Cuts for the Rich. I emailed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, my own Representative and Senators in Congress, and the President — all by feedback form at their websites — to try to give them some backbone in fiting FOR the poor and middle class, and AGAINST the rich. This is the message I sent to members of Congress.

Please do NOT compromise on ending tax breaks for the rich! The tax cuts have plainly NOT created jobs (in the United States; in China and India, maybe), but HAVE increased the deficit. The Republicans keep talking about cutting the deficit as their very highest priority, so they cannot POSSIBLY justify a tax cut for the rich that will INCREASE the deficit. The Democrats must submit legislation to renew the present tax rates for the poor and middle class ONLY, and refuse Republican efforts to amend that legislation to include the rich. Force Republicans to vote up or down on tax cuts for the poor and middle class. Force them to go on record as opposing tax cuts for the poor and middle class, if they are serious about that, so the people can finally see plainly that Republicans are their enemy.

Let the Republicans offer their own, separate bill to cut taxes for the rich, and then vote against it, showing the people that Democrats will NOT let Republicans increase the deficit to benefit the rich.

Stick it to the Republicans by telling the American people "We want the poor and middle class to continue to have low taxes. The Republicans want to RAISE the taxes on the middle class if we won't give the rich, super-rich, and OBSCENELY rich, tax breaks they DON'T NEED and that do absolutely no good for the economy but, quite the contrary, INCREASE the deficit and burden your children and grandchildren with hundreds of billions more dollars of debt."

Point out who OWNS the national debt, and who gets the interest from the Treasury securities that fund it — which largely explains why the Republicans have OCTUPLED the national debt during their Administrations ever since 1980.

Tell the President he can screw himself, but he's not going to screw the American people. (You don't have to use those exact words, but feel free to. I generally don't approve of sexual rhetoric in politics, but it fits here, doesn't it?)

You can also tell Obama that it doesn't matter how much he gives in to the Republicans, they are still going to try to impeach him — because he's black, and the Republican base is racist, rural, white men. They will NEVER accept Obama's legitimacy, but will push and push and push to force him out of the WHITE House. And they're not going to wait till 2012.

Tell Obama in no uncertain terms that if he gives in to the Republicans and they nonetheless try to impeach him, you will work WITH them, and use all your influence to get all House Democrats — and Senate Democrats — to join in impeaching him! If Obama won't stick to any principle, he SHOULD go. "Our way, or the highway, buddy!" And if the Republicans somehow do not attempt to impeach, warn Obama that you will work hard to rally progressive Democrats to defeat him in the 2012 primaries, and nominate instead someone who won't sell out to the Nation's enemies — a REAL Democrat.

The version I sent to Obama has appropriate alterations, including deletion of the "screw himself" paragraph and a revised final paragraph:

You risk so antagonizing Democrats in Congress that if Republicans do try to impeach you, they will work WITH them to impeach! If you won't stick to any principle, you SHOULD go. If Republicans do not attempt to impeach (because they find you a useful tool), progressive Democrats will work very hard to defeat you in the 2012 primaries, and nominate instead someone who won't sell out to the Nation's enemies — a REAL Democrat. Republicans were wrong about the healthcare bill: THIS is your Waterloo moment.

I urge everyone hostile to the idea of running up the national debt even further, and continuing to subvert the economy just to benefit the rich who will just use their tax breaks to buy luxuries and fund the export of even more American jobs to China and India, to write your own messages to Pelosi, Reid, your own Congressmember and Senators, and the President. Just plug into Google or any other search engine the phrase "[name] email" to find their feedback form. The White House form says it allows a maximum of 2,500 characters, but their count is much higher than my word processor's, so you should probably not try to send more than about 2,100 characters.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:10 AM

 
Turning Back Time. In case you still don't understand that the Sarah Palin/Tea Party Republicans are out of their mind, I just yesterday got around to watching a podcast of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann from November 4th. It showed a SarahPAC commercial in which Palin says, "This is our morning, in America", and the sun is shown moving behind the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, the sun is shown moving from west to east! The footage was plainly of the sun SETTING.
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I live in northern New Jersey and know that the Statue of Liberty faces east-southeast, from the west side of the Hudson River/Upper New York Bay. The sun rises nowhere near the Statue of Liberty seen face-front (you can tell it's face-front because the torch is held in the statue's right hand), but behind you, over the Atlantic Ocean. The only way you could see the sun behind the statue, moving from right to left (lower to higher) is if you took the video at SUNSET, then ran it BACKWARDS. So what the commercial is really showing is time moving backwards.
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The Palin/Tea Party people could salvage that portion of the video if they wanted to say that the Nation is now headed into its sunset, and only the Radical Right can turn back the clock and restore our fading glory. But that's not what they said. They said, and I do quote, "This is our morning, in America." No, you showed sunset, and called it morning. You showed the sun moving backward in time, west to east. You lied. And you are not going to take us back in time to The Bad Old Days, pretending that they were Good. They were not.
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Name one time in American history that was better than today. One time! The days following the defeat of Fascism in WWII? Hundreds of thousands of American families were grieving the death of their sons, nephews, and friends. The Soviet Union had just taken over Eastern Europe and installed Communism in North Korea, beginning 45 years of Cold War and hot proxy wars all over the planet. Black soldiers came back to segregation, voting restrictions, and Jim Crow. Gay men were regularly entrapped and arrested, and gay bars raided by the police. The Nation's cities were about to be subverted by deliberate Federal policies to create suburbs and move white people and jobs out of central cities chopped up by superhighways and loaded down with highrise "projects" that concentrated the poor and isolated them from the world of work and integration. Try again.
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No matter what period of U.S. history you care to name, it was worse than now. The closest you can come to a time when things weren't just plain awful is the 1990's, under a Democrat, Bill Clinton, and that was the era of "Greed is good", the dot-com bubble, and the "Me Generation", which set us up for the hypergreed, trade deficits, and export of millions of jobs during the 2000's that led to the economic catastrophe of late 2008, from which we are still suffering. But we have a black President now, and the Nation is much less bigoted toward black people, homosexuals, Hispanics, Asians, lesbians, and other formerly despised minorities. We have the ability to fix our economic problems with a few simple reforms: soak the rich, end the export of jobs, and end unfair free trade.
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Who would go back to The Bad Old Days? I wouldn't.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:01 AM

 
Butchering the English Language. There have recently come into vogue two odious mispronunciations of long-established English words, "Chile" and "Chilean". As with "Nicaragua" some years back, some people in media insist on Spanicizing these words, as tho they speak Spanish and don't know the proper English pronunciation. So instead of the correct chíl.ee and chíl.ee.yan, it's all of a sudden chíl.ae or chée.lae and chi.láe.yan. No, it's not.
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"A little learning is a dangerous thing." A lot of people who have a vague idea of the sounds of Spanish have decided that all things from Spanish should be pronounced in the Spanish fashion, but they don't really KNOW Spanish. Nor are they consistent.
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The Spanish for "Chilean" is NOT chi.láe.yan but "chileno", all lowercase (chee.láe.no). So shouldn't these U.S. media types say "chileno"? No, of course not. The ENGLISH word is "Chilean", and when you are speaking English, you should use the English word, pronounced in the English fashion. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
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English is a language to itself, entitled to its own words, with their own pronunciations. Indeed, what we charitably continue to call "English" but which has, for more than a century, been dominated by the United States, is the most important language in the history of the world, spoken as first, second, or auxiliary language by more people, more widely across the planet, than any other, now or in the past. It is important that, inasmuch as is possible, as much of it is pronounced the same everywhere. The more needless variation, the harder the language is to master. And mastery of English is important, all over the world.
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English has its own way of pronouncing hundreds of thousands of words, including placenames. The mere fact that you have a vague idea of the sounds of French or Russian does not entitle you to demand that "Paris" be pronounced paa.rée, and "Moscow" be pronounced mosk.vóq (where Q is silent, used here to close an open vowel at the end of a word).
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The people in U.S. media who say chée.lae and chi.láe.yan do NOT say mékh.ee.ko or or.khen.tée.na for "Mexico" and "Argentina". Nor do they say rée.yu jee zha.náe.ru for "Rio de Janeiro", Mòenn.rae.yól for "Montreal", tzúu.reehh for "Zurich", or any of thousands of other English placenames in the local fashion. So they should stop mangling English and pronounce English placenames and nationalities in the English way. If you don't speak Spanish, don't affect a Spanish accent.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:58 PM

 
Barack the Faithless Refuses to Prosecute. Yet again, the Obama Administration has decided to actively co-conspire in the crimes of its predecessor. This time, it refuses to prosecute the people who destroyed videotapes of illegal interrogations/torture authorized by the Bush Administration.
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Voters could not punish Barack the Faithless directly on November 2nd. Instead, they struck out at innocent third parties, and ravaged this Republic in so doing. Barack Obama has no principles. He ran on principles, then got into office and immediately betrayed every principle he ran on.
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He said the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, and end a war that Bush should not even have begun. Now he's been in office for nearly two years, and he is leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until the withdrawal date that BUSH set.
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Obama ran against the flagrant violations of human rights committed by the Bush Administration in endless crimes against the Geneva Convention and U.S. anti-torture laws. Now he is covering up those crimes, by consenting to destruction of the evidence!
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Obama has sold out his base, and betrayed everything his supporters thought they were voting for. Now, Obama has gotten exactly what he wanted: a Congress that will give him an excuse for selling out every remaining principle he has not already betrayed. And everyone who voted for "Change We Can Believe In" gets more of the same old crap.
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Thus will it always be as long as voters have only Tweedledum and Tweedledee — the Plutocracy Twins — to vote for. And voters have absolutely no idea of how to break the stranglehold the major parties have on their throat. They have bought the lie that only the two (present) major parties can ever win office, so they consent to have the two major parties block third parties from the ballot, and pretend that that is democracy. It is not.
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In any case, I read the surprisingly small number of reader comments after the story about the refusal of the "Department of Justice" — it is to laff! — refusing to prosecute people who destroyed evidence of CIA crimes, and added some comments of my own in reply. You should be able to infer the kind of thing I was answering, in the 26 comments I show below.
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CNS News is a conservative propaganda outfit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercast_News_Service. Reputable news organizations have reported that waterboarding actually caused "KSM" [Khalid Sheikh Muhammed] to give FALSE information, and the useful information he LATER gave was produced by humane, legal methods of interrogation.
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"The law" did NOT find any such thing, because there was NO TRIAL. The Obama Administration has once again betrayed the Liberals who put it in office, and protected the war crimes of the prior Administration.
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Yes, Obama has betrayed his base -- which is why his base repudiated him or stayed home.
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In that we are not fiting any decalred war, our soldiers are not covered by the Geneva Convention, are they? They too are just terrorists, "irregular enemy combatants" as you call them. THINK. Your attitudes are sociopathic.
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If no law was violated, no tape would have been destroyed. Res ipse loquitur.
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Pardon me if I don't trust your statements as to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. And if no "war" has been declared, how can a uniformed "soldier" be protected by the rules of "war"?
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If jsujet laffed his ass off, would there be anything left of him?
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Raical Rightists keep justifying tyranny, because they don't believe it can ever get THEM. I'd like to see Bush, Cheney, and the rest waterboarded to see if we can get to the truth of what they knew about WMD's before the Iraq invasion. I'd also like all Radical Rightists to get a taste of their own medicine. Everyone who makes excuses for waterboarding should be subjected to it, as punishment for their crimes.
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FALSE. U.S. law specifically banned waterboarding, after it was learned that the Japanese in WWII committed it.
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The fact that the tapes were destroyed PROVES that laws WERE violated.
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The trouble with your 'thinking' is that terrorists don't put that much value on their own lives, nor on truth. People willing to strap bombs to themselves and their brother are perfectly willing to lie.
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You can be sure that if Democrats had destroyed evidence of a Democrat's misbehavior, the Radical Right would be screaming for blood.
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Silliness. There is not a square inch of habitable land on this planet that wasn't "stolen" somewhere along the way. As for atomic bombs on Japan, Japan murdered 34 million Chinese, and millions of others as well. They got off easy. As for Dresden, that was only one of many atrocities on both sides of modern "total war", and I'd like to know how you would have tried to prevent the takeover of Southeast Asia by Communist militaries without bombs.
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If Obama had wanted to prosecute, there would be a prosecution. I was wondering how the Radical Right would find fault in Obama for doing something they wanted him to do. Now I see: you just pretend that he wanted to prosecute, when in fact it is obvious he did not. We on the Left are the ones who are properly indignant at Obama.
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Experts on interrogation and intelligence have said repeatedly that torture elicits LIES. Pay attention. Moreover, if the interrogations were lawful, the tapes would have been preserved, and the CIA would be bragging about how much useful information they elicited. Perhaps the main reason they were destroyed is that the information they developed turned out to be FALSE.
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Be consistent. Why don't we use waterboarding on the Mafia or street-gang members? If torture elicits truth, we could prevent lots of murders by torturing gangsters.
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The unreliability of compelled confessions is why we videotape police interrogations, instituted Miranda warnings, and outlawed the rubber hose in stationhouses.
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If Habanero69er really thinks the U.S. is in danger of shariah law being imposed on the United States, he should seek professional help.
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jimkimsan's thesis that "all's fair in love and war" conflicts with the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. And if he thinks that people who are willing to strap bombs to their bodies, or even put a bomb in their UNDERWEAR are going to be dissuaded by waterboarding, he is as demented as evil.
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You know nothing about anything. Afghanistan has had DECADES of war. Do you really think that more war is the cure for decades of war? The Palestinians have been victims of military attack and invasion for 60 years, and both they and their allies are willing to fite another 60 or 100 or 300 years to get justice. The way to end wars is to do justice. When Britain and France inflicted an unjust peace on Germany after WWI, we got WWII. When the U.S. forbade a repeat of such insanely punitive provisions after WWII, we got peace.
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The United States has killed WAY over a MILLION Iraqis, who never attacked us, with the support of the bulk of Americans. Let us stop pretending to be innocents.
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jimkimsan's views are psychotic and sociopathic. He draws no distinction between prisoners of war and active combatants. He thinks he knows who -- not wearing a uniform -- is friend and who foe. Or is he just a teeshirt speaking: "Kill them all! Let God sort them out"? The United States attacked Iraq TWICE for no reason but to protect Israel, while pretending in the first war to be protecting Kuwait, which Senator Moynihan of NY called "a poisonous enemy" of the United States. But militarists never ask questions, and never think about right and wrong. Soldiers are supposed to take orders, no matter what they may be, and they pretend to deserve honor when they have none.
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Domenic is naive. The United States has made itself hated around the world with its massive violence against Arabs in particular and Moslems more generally. Past governments have supported tyrants all around the world and used "gunboat diplomacy" to serve the interests of the United Fruit Company in Central America and other corporations in countries on every continent. Europeans who live as well as we do, do NOT envy us in any regard, and there are scarcely any immigrants from Europe now, nor have there been for decades. Europeans are highlhy critical of our foolish and militarist foreign policy, as well they should be -- as well WE should be
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Only trivial numbers of American soldiers are being killed -- less in Afghanistan in nine years than during D-Day -- one day. Using 'saving U.S. lives' as an excuse for descending into barbarism does not work.
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Our troops' lives are NO more important than other troops' lives, or civilians' lives, in any country. Your stance is TRIBALIST, if not even racist.
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So I guess if it gets back to us that U.S. troops captured by foreign armies ARE waterboarded, the American Radical Right will be just fine with that.
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That "logic' excuses all war crimes and crimes against humanity -- and then comes right back on us, as our enemies use our inhuman acts to justify even more vicious acts against us. Round and round it goes, and everyone is brought low. As for killing people, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are pikers as against the United States. The Iraqi death toll in the CURRENT Iraq war is 1.4 million, and counting; 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, were killed by sanctions in the decade after the first Iraq war; and an unknown, but large, number of Iraqis were killed by the United States in the first Iraq war. But you consider the U.S. innocents. There is another meaning of "innocent": clueless. Americans are that kind of "innocent".
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Yes, jsujet, people who invade a country that never attacked us and kill HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of innocents there are INDEED war criminals -- as are the people who make excuses for their crimes.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Olbermann Suspended?! The cable network MSNBC has, insanely, suspended its greatest star, Keith Olbermann, for making LEGAL contributions to three Congressional campaigns, in violation of "newsroom policies". Putting aside for the moment the question of whether Olbermann's show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, is a news show or a commentary program to which "newsroom" policies are irrelevant, there is a fundamental issue of a corporation's asserting the right to forbid its employees from exercising their political rights.
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So I sent the following message to MSNBC via feedback form this evening.

MSNBC does NOT have the right to take its employees' political rights away. You cannot forbid them to vote; you cannot forbid them to make legal contributions to campaigns. That is contrary to public policy of the most fundamental kind: preserving democracy. Keith Olbermann should SUE you for many millions of dollars, at least treble economic damages plus punitive damages for injury to his reputation. Any comparison to Rupert Murdoch, and thus accusation of hypocrisy by Olbermann, is absurd: Murdoch claims that he is impartial — that Fox News is "fair and balanced". Keith Olbermann never claimed to be impartial but has always been a partisan for the Liberal point of view. His fairness constitutes showing what people have themselves said, before responding. I will NEVER watch ANYTHING on or from MSNBC until Keith Olbermann is restored — with a public APOLOGY.

NO corporation has the right to interfere with people's political rights. If one corporation can do so, then ALL corporations can do so, and the great majority of Americans could be forbidden to vote or donate to political campaigns. MSNBC's outrageous, antidemocratic, and illegal behavior must be slapped down hard. Whoever made that decision — be it one fool or a whole boardroomful of fools — should be "suspended indefinitely, without pay". And Federal civil-rights authorities should PROSECUTE them for interfering with people's RIGHTS to vote and contribute to political campaigns. They should be sent to PRISON for a month or year, as a warning to all corporations that they may NOT, in law, deprive people of their political rights as a condition to employment.
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This is a very serious issue, and should be prosecuted by the Government.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:36 PM

 
The Good with the Bad. Yesterday's election may prove a very bad thing for the Nation, but not all of the results were bad. Three megamillionairesses LOST, despite pouring a collective $210 million of their own money into their campaigns. Linda McMahon, the crotch-kneeing harpie in Connecticut, lost $45M of her own money in her failed effort to become a U.S. Senator (Senatress?). Carly Fiorina spent over $5M of her own money in her failed attempt to unseat Barbara Boxer in a California race for U.S. Senate. And Meg Whitman poured some $160M of her own money into her failed attempt to become Governess of California. "Money talks, bullsh*t walks?" In this election, it seems that at least in some races both money and megamillionaire b.s. walked, at least on the Coasts.
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Other very good things happened last nite: the Tea Party wingnut candidate for U.S. Senate in Delaware Christine O'Donnell was trounced, as was Tea Party candidate for Governor Carl Paladino — a millionaire who also used a lot of his own money — in NYState. Astonishingly, some of the Tea Party candidates who were defeated made speeches as tho they had won! Paladino, in a combative 'concession' speech, dared to claim that more than 40% of New Yorkers voted against the Democrat, Andrew Cuomo (son of an earlier NYS Governor, Mario C~), thus showing that New Yorkers favor the platform they had just massively defeated! The reality is that Paladino got LESS than 40%, according to tonite's local news on NYC television station WPIX.
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Sarah Palin proved much less than the "kingmaker" she had been made out to be. She lost almost as many races as she 'won' — or is it "guessed at"? She may even have lost in her home state of Alaska! We won't know until all the write-in votes are counted, but at this point it looks as tho Lisa Murkowski, scioness of the Murkowski political dynasty that Palin hates, beat Palin's choice, Joe Miller.
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In Nevada, Liberal Harry Reid decisively defeated another Tea Party loon, Sharron Angle, who tried to rally white power against Latinos, and was defeated by the Latino vote.
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NY and CA surfed the Red Tide. NJ (my state) saw 1 seat in Congress move into the Red (but Dems will still outnumber Republicans 7 to 6 overall come January). NJ may be the most densely populated state in the Union, but it has a lot of rich suburbs and conservative rural areas that have always voted Republican. The one new Republican winner, Jon Runyan, is a former Philadelphia Eagles football-player celebrity, who defeated a one-term Jewish Democrat (John Adler) in a traditionally Republican district. The triumph of celebrity means very little, esp. in that on NJ television tonite Runyan expressed a desire to reach across the aisle (to Democrats) once seated, which is hardly the Tea Party attitude. (He is not, alas, an intellectual giant. In one debate, he was asked to name one Supreme Court decision in the past 12 or 20 years that he disagreed with, and he came up with Dred Scott — which was decided in 1857!)
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Adler's defeat, along with that of Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, may be indicative of a reduction in the huge overrepresentation of Jews in both houses of Congress. If that actually happened nationwide — tho Richard Blumenthal, a Jew, will replace Chris Dodd, a Christian, in one of Connecticut's two Senate seats — that would also be to the good.
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California voters turned thumbs-down to legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Wonderful (that is sincere, not ironic). In my state, voters approved a measure to forbid state government from raiding state-employee pension funds for current governmental expenses. Also wonderful.
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In the less civilized areas of the Nation, alas, money and b.s. triumphed, thanks to the stupidity and weak will of the POP (Party of Pussies — i.e., Democrats). Obama and the Democrats repeatedly — indeed, nearly endlessly — alienated their base by selling out the Left and moving to the Right, just like the pseudo-Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton sold out his Liberal base even as the Republicans waged full-scale war against him, culminating in Clinton's impeachment by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives of the day. Obama should heed that history. Reaching out to Republicans will NOT ensure they will not try to destroy his Administration, even impeach him, very personally. A lot of Tea Partiers keep talking about not wanting to wait until 2012 to get rid of Obama. Absent assassination, that pretty much leaves impeachment, doesn't it? I can't see Obama resigning, even if he should prove to be our first bad black President. And a vote to impeach Obama in the House of Representatives would be pointless (as it was with Clinton), in that Democrats retain control of the Senate, which tries impeachments.
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Insane Misinterpretations. Tim Kaine, Democratic National Committee Chairman, is one of the fools who said on air today that the voters showed that they want the parties to work together. What!? The Republicans have been militantly obstructionist for Obama's entire term thus far, refusing to work with the Democrats. Democrats tried to bring them onboard in one area after another, but they absolutely refused. To elicit bipartisanship from Republicans, Obama encouraged Dems to compromise away all the features of healthcare reform that the Nation wanted — single-payer, financed from general revenues and higher taxes on the obscenely rich — accepting one Republican amendment after another after another. After the watered-down and much-altered bill was rendered completely unacceptable to the people by Republican suckering of Democratic naifs, the Republicans voted against the resulting crappy and unconstitutional bill, and stuck the Democrats with the blame.
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So the Republicans REFUSED to cooperate, REFUSED to be bipartisan, yet the electorate REWARDED them with 60 (or so) seats in the House. Democrats interpret that as a vote for bipartisanship? Are they insane? Answer: yes.
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The reality is that there is, building in this country, revolutionary rage. If the Tea Party cannot achieve a damned thing once seated because the Republicans will not give them more than scraps from the table of the rich, a lot of people will give up on ballots and look to bullets. It's not the Tea Party that matters. They are boobs and rubes who have been used. Once they wake to how they were led around by the nose, they will be angry, and give up on democracy — unless we can make fundamental reforms to make democracy work.
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Triumph of Antidemocracy. "The people have spoken" is bullsh*t. What percentage of American adults voted yesterday? That is, alas, very hard to say, in part because definitions vary, in part because that issue has not been addressed in the election analysis I have seen so far. "Voter turnout" is not the same as "eligible voter turnout". People "eligible" to vote are all adults (save, at least for a time, convicted felons). Not all people eligible to vote, voted yesterday. Not remotely. In Orlando, Florida, turnout was anticipated to be 44% of registered voters. In King County, the Seattle area of Washington had a turnout of 71% of registered voters. But ABC News points out that "registered voters" are nothing like "eligible voters".

Fifty-four percent of non-voters this year identify themselves as Democrats, compared to just 30 percent who align with Republicans, the Pew survey found. Non-voters are also overwhelmingly more likely to profess ignorance of the Tea Party than their likely voter peers. * * *

Fewer than 48 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in 2006, according to Census data compiled by McDonald. In 1994, when Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress, 48.4 percent of voters turned out at the polls. * * *

Statistics show non-voters tend to be younger, less educated, less affluent than their voting peers and more likely to be a member of a minority group

Actually, the 48% turnout figure given above is much too high. In 2006, it was 37.1%. In 2008, the Obama Presidential campaign year, turnout was 56.8%, which means that 43.2% of eligible voters did not vote, and, thus, that only a minority of eligible voters on the order of 30% — less than 1/3 — selected the President and Congress. In 1960, the year Kennedy was elected, the turnout was 63.1%, the very highest in all of recent history. That election split very evenly, so perhaps 32% of all eligible voters determined everything. That is not democracy. Assuming that the typical midterm-election turnout occurred this year, about 37%, the 'massive Republican victory' — the "sweep", the "shellacking" Obama spoke of — amounts to at most 20% of eligible voters, which is exactly the level of participation I decried here Monday.
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The people who stay home are not, as the ABC News story points out, the same as the people who vote, so we would have different results depending on who votes. It's not like scientifically randomized polling, in which the people questioned are presumably very like the entire population. No, different kinds of people vote than stay home, and there are more people who stay home than vote. So we end up with election results that are in no way representative of the will of "the people", despite claims that "the people have spoken". No, they really have not.
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Why do we content ourselves with an electoral system that produces absolutely unrepresentative and antidemocratic results, and saddles us with people who are NOT acceptable to the great majority of Americans? The people become more disaffected with each unrepresentative election. At some point, the Government will lose its legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and cynicism will turn to fury.
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Barack the Faithless Strikes Again. Obama is making noises about extending the Bush tax cuts on the super-rich, even tho he has alerted us to the projection that unless taxes rise on the super-rich, the Nation will lose $700 BILLION over the next 10 years to the rich, and the national debt will thus rise by $700B. How is it "fiscally responsible" for Republicans to saddle the Nation with $700 billion more debt, just to benefit the super-rich? For Democrats to agree to this unfunded giveaway of hundreds of billions of dollars to the greedy rich would be to ensure that the budget deficit continues to grow, the economy continues to be depressed, and the Democrats will be blamed in 2012 for ever more astronomical deficits while the economy continues to underperform. Conclusion: Democrats don't mean anything they say, but are as much servants of the rich as are Republicans.
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Will the Democrats in their "lame-duck" session pass ANYTHING the people want? Extend low taxes for the poor and middle class but refuse to extend tax cuts for the rich? Revive the estate tax? Repeal "don't ask, don't tell"? End the tax loophole that subsidizes overseas outsourcing? Cut Communist China's access to our market if it does not let its currency rise, and end all other unfair trade practices? Or will Obama cave on everything and let the free-trade, outsourcing-is-GREAT Republicans continue to subvert the economic future of the United States?
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There is still time to use the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress and the White House to pass legislation the Nation needs. And the Republicans cannot possibly repeal those measures in the next two years because they do not control the Senate or White House.
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A Day Late and 356 Billion Dollars Short. Something that was not in time, alas, was something I saw today on NBC Nitely News. Matt Lauer of the Today Show was granted an exclusive interview with former President George W. Bush. In a segment shown tonite, Lauer asks about the TARP "bank bailout", about which so many voters this year were indignant. Bush admitted that it was HIS Administration that came up with the plan, that he knows a lot of people are upset about it, but that it was absolutely necessary and if he had to do it all over again, he would. Why wasn't that shown BEFORE the election, so at least some fair-minded voters would be a little less angry at Obama and the Democrats? So much for "the liberal media". NBC News embargoed that part of the Lauer interview until AFTER the election. That fact will not for an instant nor to any degree, however, prevent the Radical Right from continuing to talk drivel about "liberal media bias".
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Moreover, the Wikipedia article on TARP links to the savings and loan bailout, which cost the Nation $160.1 billion — under Dubya's father, George H.W. Bush, another Republican, 22 years ago, when $160B went a lot farther than it does today. So why are Democrats tarred with the "bailout" brush? Because neither the Democrats nor the "liberal media" reminded voters of the truth. Worse, the "bailout" and "stimulus" were confused in almost everyone's mind, and neither the Democrats nor the "liberal media" bothered to straighten things out.
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Statehood for Puerto Rico, with the U.S. Virgin Islands. The lame-duck session dominated by Congress must move the question of Puerto Rico statehood by ending the madly misnamed "Commonwealth" status that keeps Puerto Rico poor, and forcing PR to choose statehood or independence, with no third option. If the electorate approves statehood, the U.S. Congress will have some 6 more Hispanic votes in the House and 2 in the Senate. Since Republicans anticipate that most, if not all, of those votes will be controlled by Democrats, they will not move the question if they gain the White House in 2012; and if the Democrats don't move the question now, Puerto Rican citizens of the United States will continue to suffer the second-class citizenship they have had since 1917. How can a black President smile on second-class citizenship for anyone? And how can a party supposedly devoted to equality and social justice sit on their hands and let this outrage continue?
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If the voters of Puerto Rico (and the U.S. Virgin Islands, voting together) reject (joint) statehood, Puerto Rico should be forced into independence, and forfeit all Federal aid — which would save us $11 billion a year. Now THAT'S fiscally responsible.
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If PR rejects statehood and is forced into independence, the Virgin Islands' status should not change unless VIslanders vote against statehood, in which case, that colony should as well be forced into independence and cut off from Federal aid — another saving to mainland taxpayers. In the alternative, the referendum legislation could provide that if the Virgin Islands is not merged into a new State of Puerto Rico, it will be merged into the next closest state, Florida. No one should have second-class citizenship in the United States. And only statehood confers first-class citizenship. Ergo, all our colonies must be converted to states or merged into existing states. Now, not in another hundred years.
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War for Profit. Political commentator David Broder has suggested that the U.S. could solve its economic problems by making war against Iran.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail [in seeking re-election in 2012]. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

This appalling suggestion appeared in a column in The Washington Post October 31st, but I heard of it only yesterday. Broder is Jewish. Despite his explicit denial that he is advocating war with Iran, he of course is advocating war against Iran. Two wars for Israel isn't enuf for some Zionists. They want three — by the U.S., of course, not by Israel. Israel can't fite three wars against Islam, but is eager to fite Islam to the last American. Israel was essentially defeated in its last war against the Moslem world, its occupation of Lebanon. So it sees its security dependent upon its absolute control of the United States. Will Obama have the guts to refuse Radical-Zionist demands he take on yet a third war against Moslem countries? How could any such THIRD war NOT be seen as a clear statement that the U.S. is indeed at war against Islam itself?
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"I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected." Yes you are. Your denial fools no one. And your war would be not for "the world" but for Israel. Alas, you might fool some people about that.
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Yesterday's election, after all, proved H.L. Mencken's famous truism: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Dissuading Islamist Terrorists. To the extent that any terrorist is persuaded to kill himself by promises of being met in Paradise by 72 virgins waiting to be ravished (in heaven!), we can counteract that appeal by making complete CASTRATION --— removal of testes and penis — before execution the punishment for attempted mass murder. How are you going to enjoy 72 virgins with no genitals, fool? Actually, of course, there is no Paradise, no God, no virgins — and why would these Islamist fools think they would have a body in heaven?
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Another penalty for terrorists should be cremation of the body — after appropriate organs and tissues have been harvested for decent people. Islam forbids cremation, so in mandating cremation for terrorists, governmental authorities would be making a very public pronouncement that terrorists are not entitled to the privileges or rites of Islam, but are treated as nonbelievers.
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Ultimately, the world needs to end all crazy superstition, and make people deal with the reality that there is no afterlife, and no future lives after this one, so we must all work together to make the world as good as it possibly can be, for everyone. There is no Heaven, no Paradise, but maybe we can approach heaven on Earth or Earthly Paradise, if we will just stop all the lunacy and do as every major ethical and religious leader has always told us to do: obey the Golden Rule. Whether the Golden Rule is expressed in the negative (do no harm to others, as you would have them do no harm to you) or positive (do to others as you would have them do to you) doesn't much matter.
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"Voters" vs. "The People". We are told that 'the people will be heard tomorrow'. No they won't. Only voters, who are typically much less than half the eligible population (not "registered voters", who are nothing like the eligible population), will be heard. In the United States, turnout of an unrepresentative minority defeats "the will of the people" every time.
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NEVER should a minority rule. Ever. But in the United States, a majority or even a mere plurality of a minority, sometimes as little as 20% of the eligible electorate overall, controls everything. That is not democracy. That is antidemocratic lunacy.
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We are ruled by people who do not represent "us" in the slitest. That must change.
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Unrepresentative voting is the problem; compulsory voting is the solution.
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The very least we can do is pass laws that require a "quorum of the people", a turnout of at least 3/4 of all eligible voters — not registered voters, but all adult citizens — before an election can be regarded as legitimate. No quorum? No legitimacy, so no one gets elected by the nonrepresentative minority that does vote. The election must be held again, and again, and again, until at least 3/4 of all people eligible to vote actually do vote and a majority of all voters agree on one candidate.
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If 3/4 of the people don't turn out, then at the end of their terms, all people not legitimately elected must vacate their seats, and whoever is left, who was voted in legitimately by a majority of a quorum of the people, controls the legislature. If a single position is at issue, like mayor, governor, or President, and 3/4 of the people do not turn out for the election, or a majority of that 3/4 turnout does not approve a candidate (as in a three-way race), the post remains VACANT until a legitimate election DOES occur, be it a runoff or a new election with new candidates. No mayor, no governor, no President, no representative in a state legislature nor Congress should be seated for any district in which the turnout is less than 3/4 of the people! (In the case of President of the United States, a law of succession would fill the office on at least an interim basis. At present, that law provides that the Speaker of the House of Representatives becomes President.) That would crack the whip over both the political parties and the electorate to get out the vote.
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3/4 of eligible voters is actually the very least we should require for an election to have effect. We could require 90%, or 95%. Some countries with compulsory voting have a 98% turnout — as well they should. As well WE should.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:43 PM