Feb

21

Have you ever noticed that? I do all the time. Bother you? Bothers me. Lots of catchy slogans, lots of hyperbole, but hardly ever does one hear it directly quoted.

Why is that?

Could it be that most folks have never read it?

Could it be that they have read it and realize that they cannot use the constitution to support their own positions?

Why is it?

Curious? …I am.

Here is quote from the constitution:

“Section 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”

I would like to offer a few points here.

For those that claim that our Federal Income Tax is unconstitutional because of issues concerning apportionment.  Note that section 8 authorizes “Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” be collected for the purpose of paying its debts. But, it only mentions “Duties, Imposts and Excises ” needing to be uniform. It purposely excludes the word taxes.

Next point, section 8 authorizes Congress the power to collect revenues for not only our defense, but also for the “general welfare” of the United States. We have a healthcare system that in the last 20 years doubled expenditures when weighed against GDP.

We have insurance companies that have dropped over 2 million US Citizens from covereage. We have young people and other reckless citizens that refuse to buy healthcare but do not think twice about showing up at an ER knowing they must be care for in some way. Frankly, I want to blame the insurance companies. I really do. But, they are involved in a for profit business. The less they dole out in expenditures (our care) the more profit they make. That is their charter.

How is this problem not related to the “general welfare” of the Untied States?

You may not agree on the solution, but share with me an area of the constitution that will make your case that healthcare reform is in violation of the constitution. I just have cited you section 8 which unless you are a total bullshit artist and spin-meister (The name Dick Armey comes to mind) is in direct support of healthcare reform. This section also justifies single payor and even a complete takeover of healthcare by our government. This is not something I would be in favor of. But our constitution supports it.

Finally, I would suggest all you folks out there pick up and read our constitution. You will find that many of your positions are quite baseless when trying to tie them directly to the constitution.

Finally, section 8 says, and I quote… ”Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”…

Hmmmmmm, “to pay the Debts.”

Maybe you could all quit the talk about bloodshed and revolution. The constitution also has provisions for dealing with idiots like you. If you have something that our government is doing that is unconstitutional then I am with you 100%…

Maybe some of you could become rationale again and we could start to have a meaningful dialog about how we are running up debt for things we really do not need, and that we are paying for it with debt. I believe in this we may have actually stumbled across something that is unconstitutional.

Like say… giving the American public a tax cut for 7 years that had to be financed through debt from other countries.

 

 

Feb

18

It is one thing to take a position on an issue. It is what makes our country free. It is even okay to take an extreme position on an issue. But when you advocate violence for your ideals you need to be accountable. Words matter.

There are people out there like Joe Stack and Scott Roeder and Timothy McViegh. Many more people like them. Your words matter. If you want to change the minds of the American public you need to do it through civil discourse.

Flying a plane into a building was an act of terrorism on 9/11. It still is. The size of the plane does not matter, nor does the citizenship of the pilot.

Feb

17

Check These Items That Fit Your Belief System, and the type of America you wish to be a part of

[ ] A nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership

[ ] Authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system

[ ] Ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong

[ ] Identifies violence and war as actions that create national regeneration

[ ] Resists autonomy of cultural or ethnic groups

[ ] Blames capitalism and liberal democracies

[ ] Advocates a single-party state

I will bet none of you checked any of these. If you did, maybe one or two.  Yet if this does not spell the former Bush Administration, The Tea Party Movement, The incessant filibusters of the current minority party even on legislation they would normally support, and even many of you well educated Americans that for whatever reason cannot see the plain truth that is before you. 

This list is Glen Beck

This list is Bill O’Reilly

This list is Sean Hannity

This list is Fox News (sic)

This list is the Patriot Act

This list is two wars we still wage

This list is why you do not see a single Black, Asian, or Hispanic face in a Tea party crowd

This list is Sarah Palin

This list is Rush Linbaugh

This list is the Federal Reserve

This list is Wall Street

This list is the Health Insurance mobsters

This list is Wal-Mart

This list is what many in the Christian right have become

…This list is the very definition of FASCISM

…Joe McCarthy here we go again

Jan

22

Their bonus pool is only 16.2 billion dollars. Yes, only a paltry $16,200,000,000 dollars for the year. We need you to sing Fergie, Bono, Ms. Crow. We need to raise some cash for these poor souls.

We have become numb to numbers to the point that they have no meaning to us any more, so let me put this in perspective for you. According to yahoo (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=GS) they have 35,500 employees. That bonus pool works out to $456,338 dollars per employee. Given old Lloyd and his top cronies will be getting a few hundred million of that it is safe to say that the mailroom and the admin pool will be getting stiffed.

To further put this in perspective, with the median household income around $55,000 this bonus pool represents 294,545 families in America. The 10 billion we gave these ziff-bags in TARP money could have been used to put 285,000 Americans to work at a decent wage for a year.

What exactly does Goldman Sachs do to contribute to America?

Well, they do make a contribution to our economy. For one they took risky, reckless real estate loans, packaged them up and sold them as securities, and then had balls so big they also bought hedges against the manure they sold.

Not only did they make money selling this crap to institutional investors dumb enough to buy them, they also make billions (with a B) when our economy almost went over the cliff. In fact, some of the TARP money we gave to AIG went to payoff these vile scumbags.

This is capitalism? This is so far beyond Antionette telling the poor “to eat cake” it is not even funny. Each day I dig a little deeper into the cess-pool that corporations have become the more I realize that socialism is alive and well. Socialism for the the rich that is.

Where art thou Robin Hood? 

 

Jan

20

In 7 of the 8 years Bush was in office we received a tax cut. Since I do want to spark civil unrest I will not even tell you what people with incomes over 100,000 got out of the deal (much more than the numbers you see below).

My source for this information is 100% solid. I used the IRS Tax Tables to determine this information. If you think I am snowing you, Google and look for yourself. They are readily available on the net.

If you were married with a total income of $25,000 your average tax break over his 8 years was $2.80 a month.

If you were married with a total income of $50,000 your average tax break over his 8 years was $7.55 (1.1%) a month. 

If you were married with a total income of $95,000 your average tax break over his 8 years was $39.55 (2.8%) a month. 

Share with me how those numbers increased the quality of your life? As I said, these are not B.S. numbers, they are straight out of the tax tables you and I use to file our taxes.

So, what did this cost us? [This is where Macro and Micro are worlds apart]

The Bush tax cuts will cost the American Public $2.48 trillion over the 2001-2010 period. This includes the revenue loss of $2.11 trillion that results directly from the Bush tax cuts as well as the $379 billion in additional interest payments on the national debt. The tax cuts were DEBT FINANCED! China I believe covered most of the costs.

 

Jan

18

Martin Luther King is still on my list of the top ten people I would love to break bread with. He is one of the most eloquent speakers I have heard in my lifetime. He was also the best example I can think of, of a man who applied his convictions and principles in the face of a problem so large and threatening on a personal level that it would have been easy to let someone else take up the battle. He gave his life for his cause.

What he did for African-Americans (just Americans in my book) is something we cannot ever measure. He is truly among one of the great Americans in our nations history.

But, from this white guys perspective it took us from the end of the civil war in 1865, until 1964, 100 years to get civil rights legislation. In 2010 we are still far from a country that to quote Dr. King, “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

We are a long way from this ideal.

I do not want to minimize the issue of race. I do not want to minimize the fact that Barack Obama is our first African-American President. I do want to say that white, black, green, male, female… in his first year he has done a remarkable job. REMARKABLE.

When you examine the bag of shit he inherited, it is just unprecedented, even going back to what FDR walked into. He has assembled a great team, and has kept us from a second great depression. If you examine his record in the first year alone he has already accomplished what most Presidents take a full term to do.

I am glad he is my President. I have every confidence he is going to lead us out of this mess. He will do so despite the obstructionist attitude of the other party. He will do so irrespective of whether the makeup of his Congress changes. He will lead us out of this mess because he is a natural born leader. He is a man like Dr. King of great character. Great character may not be able to transcend bigotry and ignorance, but great character will always transcend race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.

ALWAYS!

 

 

 

Jan

13

We did not think twice in coming to the aid of Haiti. Our collective thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti.

A poor country that has even less now.

Help a neighbor when they are down.

“I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Jan

6

We recently purchased a new car. Our credit is good. I had no doubt walking in that we would be approved and we were. If your credit is good you can borrow money.

Banks have begun lending to people and businesses that are a good credit risk. This is a good thing. People in debt are paying off their debts. This is a very good thing. Savings rates which were actually zero have dramatically gone up in the past 14 months. This is actually a good thing as banks are allowed to loan money based upon a multiplier (this is called leverage) based upon the deposits they have on  hand.  Manufacturing is up which is a good thing.

They call all this capitalism, something we have failed to practice in the last decade. 

On the flip-side. Most the banks have paid the government TARP money back. They have done this based upon these 0 interest rate loans that they invested back into the stock market that is now up. Unfortunately they still are holding many of these stocks. If the market takes another dip, guess what? We are back in the same boat.

The behavior of wall street is still reckless. We still have a mortgage crisis in both the commercial and residential sectors. This is not so good. We need to kick some ass and take names on this front.

We are still fighting and paying for two wars, this is not good.

Government deficits are out of control with no end in sight. To add to this we are between a rock and hard place in the respect that to get out of this mess for the next few years we need to keep spending more than we have. This is not good.

The biggest challenge we face is medicare and medicade expenditures. This is why healthcare reform is so damn important. The Democrats less the blue-dogs holding the party hostage actually have the 51 votes in Congress to pass real reform that will help us reign in costs in both the short term and for the future. Unfortunately the Democrats are too stupid to use reconciliation. They say doing so would take to long. Hmmmmmm, you mean like the Republicans did to you to get through tax cuts during the Bush administration when we were running two wars. They seemed to be able to do it pretty quick. For those of you with short memories Dick “Lucifer” Cheney cast the deciding vote to break the 50-50 deadlock. Hmmmmm, Tea-party people where was your outrage back then on this?

To be fair here are the republicans that voted no.

Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine,
Gordon Smith of Oregon,
Mike DeWine of Ohio and
Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.

Voting no on a tax cut in the midst of running two wars, low unemployment, and huge federal deficits is beyond insane. These five did the right thing. Three are out of office now. That was their reward. Only the Maine Senators remain. Obviously Maine has their head screwed on straight. Maybe when we stop voting people out of office for doing the hard but right thing more of our elected officials will be inclined to do the right thing.

Anyone that tells you that they are going to increase spending and lower taxes and it will all balance out is an idiot. Anyone that thinks that makes sense is an idiot. Maybe it is time that we stop listening to idiots.

Out #1 immediate priority is to drop unemployment back to pre meltdown levels. This will require more deficit spending but is needed. On the day we accomplish this the next priority is to have a tax increase that affects every American making more than the poverty level.

Yes, a tax increase!

We also need to cut federal spending and to take the excess and pay down our debt owned to foreign nations. The only way we are going to pull this off is to give the president line item veto like Clinton had. He was able to have 4 years of budget surpluses. It worked back then it will work again. He was the last president since Eisenhower that had budget surpluses.

It is time to pull our heads out and quit living on fantasy island. I am completely aligned with the tea-party on this one. But this includes all Americans and all of our elected officials irrespective of political party.

Once we pull our collective heads out many of you could go out to your vehicles and scrape off the bumper sticker that says “We are spending are children inheritance.”

Spending tomorrows money today screws future generations. It is not funny. It is selfish. It is immoral. Knock it off.

Jan

6

I have been thinking about the recent attempted attack on a US airliner quite a bit. I have not really been able to put the right words together to solidify my thoughts. Mr. Friedman did it for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06friedman.html

Here are a few excerpts that struck a chord with me.

In speaking of the terrorists father…
“He went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and warned us that text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent, and possibly dangerous, radical.”

Not to mention that man put his life at risk in doing so. Would he have been willing to do this if we were still torturing people?

…and… he wrote

“We can’t let our country become just The United States of Fighting Terrorism and nothing more. We are the people of July 4th — not Sept. 11th.”

Jan

6

I must say that going back to the time of the republican presidential debates I really got to listen to Ron Paul. He is for fiscal responsibility and civil liberties. These are both very important issues to me and to many moderates that make up the vast majority of the independent voting community.

I also must say that the dismissive reaction his fellow republicans gave him in facial expressions alone when he spoke pretty much told the story that he had no chance.

But with the tea-party movement that is a strange collection of mostly extremists do not count him out. And, politics can sometimes make strange bedfellows. It is possible that he could get the parties nomination in 2012. And, I have to admit of all the people in the current Republican party I would actually consider voting for him in the 2012 election.Not a single other person in your party has a chance of getting my vote.
As far as the rest of that party I only have one piece of sound advice. Stop lying to us. Almost everything that comes out of your leaders mouths (most recently that Obama has some problem using the word Terrorist) is so lame and easily debunked that you have lost credibility with most Americans. Start citing real facts and taking real stands on issues and prosposing solutions to problems we face. If not, your days are numbered.

— keep looking »

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