Tag: republicans

Personal, not Principle

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The Republican Congress didn’t reject universal gun background checks on principle, but because, 

The magnitude, intensity, and obsession of rightist hatred of the president is unprecedented in the history of American politics because it has poisoned the ability of Republican leaders in Congress to work in good faith with a twice-elected American president.

This GOP leadership’s fear and sanction of rightist hatred towards the president foments a near total obstruction against anything the president and Democrats propose, creates a near total gridlock of government in Washington and demonstrates a contempt for long-held notions of American civic life that have traditionally been accepted by all major political parties.

That comes from that leftist rag the “Hill“. 

SAFE Hysterics

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I vaguely remember a White Plains police officer visiting my elementary school to instruct us on safety or being polite or some other inculcation of “how to be a civilized person”. Most of the boys in my class, myself included, were fascinated with the handgun the officer carried on his Batman-like utility belt. He was peppered with questions about how he likes it, whether he’s ever shot it, whether he’s ever had to use it, whether he’s ever shot anyone with it, and – naturally, whether we could touch it. The answers were all in the negative. Yet something stuck with me that day; not only had the officer never used the gun in the line of duty, but his respect for his weapon was matched only by his dislike for it. He hadn’t used it, and he expressed a hope that he would never have to. It was there, but only as a last resort – and he seemed aware that it wasn’t just loaded with bullets, but that each bullet could do as much damage to a human body as it could to the officer’s own psyche. 

Forget Sandy Hook and the federal government for a second – let’s talk about New York and the SAFE Act, which Albany passed a month ago. A lot of New York gun owners are upset about the law, and they will be going to Albany lawfully to protest it. They seem particularly aggrieved by the fact that; (a) Governor Cuomo executed a message of necessity, speeding the passage and avoiding legislators’ amendments to it; and (b) the technicalities with respect to some of the law’s definitions. 

You can disagree with those matters, of course, but they don’t amount to dictatorship, nor do they seem violative of the 2nd Amendment. 

Here is a nonbinding resolution that the Erie County Legislature’s Republican caucus will be introducing shortly: 

SAFE ACT Resolution by

http://www.scribd.com/embeds/125113814/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll

(You don’t use an apostrophe to pluralize “New Yorkers”)

So, basically it praises every single portion of the NY SAFE Act, except that the definition of an assault weapon may allegedly include one particular pump-action shotgun (a particularly tenuous argument), and because it limits magazines to 7 bullets, rather than the previous 10. 

How is it that 10 bullet magazines are not violative of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, but 7 bullet magazines are tantamount to King George III stepping on the necks of patriots? 

Carl Paladino sponsored a bus trip / gun rally in Albany Tuesday, and his mass email doesn’t think the SAFE Act was legally passed, or a good idea at all. One unifying theme between Paladino and the County Legislature’s Republicans is the notion that there wasn’t enough time to “request and receive the input of constituents” regarding the law; but 2/3 of New Yorkers support it. Paladino’s list of grievances is amusing, however, for alleging that “there is no need for any change to current gun-control laws because it’s not the honest people who commit crimes.”  

You know what might be contributing to the gun violence? The Randian individualism that many gun huggers love – the ethos that nothing is greater than self, civilization and a functioning society be damned. The hippie peace and love individualist awakening has gone dramatically wrong in the last 40-some years. 

Another favorite argument is that registration is just a step towards confiscation. Just like the state has confiscated all our motor vehicles, which we are required to register from time to time. 

While Paladino’s protest reflects exactly how our system is supposed to work – government does something you don’t like, you protest and petition or agitate for something different, the legislature’s grandstanding is an utter waste of time and effort. Its nonbinding resolution is pointless, and its grievances largely without substance. 

Back to that mid-70s White Plains cop – I get the impression nowadays that gun owners have become gun huggers. They no longer view their weapons as tools they may someday be forced to use as a last resort for protection, but as objects for which they have almost a jealous longing.  They want to use them. 

Assemblyman Says Cuomo is like Hitler, Mussolini

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Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin likens Governor Cuomo’s use of “messages of necessity” to Hitler and Mussolini.

Under Article III, Section 14 of the New York State Constitution, a bill must be printed and on members’ desks in final form at least three (3) legislative days before it can be voted on for passage, unless the governor issues what is called a “message of necessity”. To do so, the governor certifies that an immediate vote is necessary on the bill once it reaches members’ desks in final form. No amendments are allowed, and a vote is to take place immediately.

In 2011, McLaughlin voted 17 times in favor of bills sent up as messages of necessity. In 2012, he did so on four of the five messages sent up by Cuomo, including the Tier VI pension plan, redistricting and an expanded DNA database for criminals.

In 2011, Cuomo issued 29 messages of necessity and used it five times last year, according to NYPIRG—the fewest number of times in recent history.

Nothing about the message of necessity takes away the legislature’s right to act, to debate, or to vote as a representative, deliberative body on the bill. The Brennan Center has targeted unnecessary messages of necessity as being ripe for criticism, noting that between 1997 – 2001, almost 30% of bills received one.

However, criticizing an overused constitutional provision for the fact that legislators have inadequate time to review and amend bills is one thing. Likening that to the horrors of National Socialism and fascism is a completely different thing, altogether.

Watch this, and note WNY Assemblywoman Jane Corwin’s reaction.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAyi6No42io]

How many messages of necessity did Hitler sign, anyway?

Perhaps not as dumb as he seems, McLaughlin apologized later in the day.

Failed Experiment Fails

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Are you wondering what’s going on with fiscal cliff negotiations? I mean, most mass media talk about it as a scary horrible thing that Washington is having trouble negotiating because Obama might be socialist and the Republicans are protecting taxpayers. Whatever. 

So, read Krugman, who notes that there’s no debt crisis – borrowing costs are at historic lows – there is a political crisis. 

a word about the current state of budget “negotiations.”

Why the scare quotes? Because these aren’t normal negotiations in which each side presents specific proposals, and horse-trading proceeds until the two sides converge. By all accounts, Republicans have, so far, offered almost no specifics. They claim that they’re willing to raise $800 billion in revenue by closing loopholes, but they refuse to specify which loopholes they would close; they are demanding large cuts in spending, but the specific cuts they have been willing to lay out wouldn’t come close to delivering the savings they demand.

It’s a very peculiar situation. In effect, Republicans are saying to President Obama, “Come up with something that will make us happy.” He is, understandably, not willing to play that game. And so the talks are stuck.

Why won’t the Republicans get specific? Because they don’t know how. The truth is that, when it comes to spending, they’ve been faking it all along — not just in this election, but for decades. Which brings me to the nature of the current G.O.P. crisis.

Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has fallen increasingly under the influence of radical ideologues, whose goal is nothing less than the elimination of the welfare state — that is, the whole legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. From the beginning, however, these ideologues have had a big problem: The programs they want to kill are very popular. Americans may nod their heads when you attack big government in the abstract, but they strongly support Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid. So what’s a radical to do?

Reminiscent of something? Maybe the Romney campaign? The Republican Party is about to become post-supply-side, and less hung up on social issues, or it will wither away. For years it has relied on the idea that it can rely on scaring easily frightened white people, and win elections. Not so much anymore. 

One is “starve the beast,” the idea of using tax cuts to reduce government revenue, then using the resulting lack of funds to force cuts in popular social programs. Whenever you see some Republican politician piously denouncing federal red ink, always remember that, for decades, the G.O.P. has seen budget deficits as a feature, not a bug.

Arguably more important in conservative thinking, however, was the notion that the G.O.P. could exploit other sources of strength — white resentment, working-class dislike of social change, tough talk on national security — to build overwhelming political dominance, at which point the dismantling of the welfare state could proceed freely. Just eight years ago, Grover Norquist, the antitax activist, looked forward cheerfully to the days when Democrats would be politically neutered: “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.”

But it didn’t work out that way. Democrats didn’t roll over, and the things for which Democrats stand for have suddenly become more popular while the Republicans have completely run out of not only specifics, but any kind of ideas at all. The Romney campaign was set up to basically point to Obama and say, “f*ck this guy”. That’s not a winning strategy. 

And look at where we are now in terms of the welfare state: far from killing it, Republicans now have to watch as Mr. Obama implements the biggest expansion of social insurance since the creation of Medicare.

So Republicans have suffered more than an election defeat, they’ve seen the collapse of a decades-long project. And with their grandiose goals now out of reach, they literally have no idea what they want — hence their inability to make specific demands.

It’s a dangerous situation. The G.O.P. is lost and rudderless, bitter and angry, but it still controls the House and, therefore, retains the ability to do a lot of harm, as it lashes out in the death throes of the conservative dream.

Our best hope is that business interests will use their influence to limit the damage. But the odds are that the next few years will be very, very ugly.

People have been predicting the Republican Party re-orientation back to a reasonable political actor for years now, but you have to reach rockbottom before you admit you have a problem and get help. Get help, people. We like good ideas. 

While you’re at it, read this set of charts from the Atlantic that show a statistical round-up of income inequality. It’ll make you angry going into the weekend. HAPPY WEEKEND. 

Sandy Beach: Race Relations Ekspurt

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Yesterday, I switched on WBEN to hear the traffic report on my way home. I was greeted by white septuagenarian Don Pesola (a.k.a. “Sandy Beach”) lecturing black people about what they should and should not think, and how they should and should not behave. Because there is no better person, and no better venue to discuss race relations and the state of being a black person in America than an aging Italian radio talk show host. 

This is one of Beach’s favorite topics; how easy it is for black people in this country. 

Beach, doing his best Bill O’Reilly interpretation, was outraged by a Rod Watson column published in yesterday’s Buffalo News. Now, to my knowledge, Mr. Beach has never been black. He has never been a racial minority in American – a minority that is judged and has been systematically oppressed and challenged within a culture that is – and always has – been dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Chances are Mr. Beach was never passed over for a job, told how to behave, thought of as criminal or subhuman, disenfranchised, or otherwise discriminated against because of the color of his skin. Chances are that when his family moved into their neighborhood, the rest of the neighborhood didn’t flee in terror. But at least the part of his show that I heard yesterday was a litany of old white guy complaints about just how easy black people have it in this country, and how hard it is for an old white guy to get a fair shake. 

In other words, WBEN was the bizarro world yesterday evening. 

The first thing I heard? Romney went to the NAACP and got booed. But Obama didn’t go at all – he takes the NAACP for granted! That’s the real racism!

The part of the show that was particularly offensive was the facile analysis – shared by many dumb commentators on the right – that this new demography whereby white people were outvoted by women, immigrants, and minorities is evidence that “redistributive socialism” won, that America is now dead, and that people voted for “stuff”. 

What an insult that is. What a startling display of sour grapes. Rod Watson suggested that much of the overreaction to Obama’s re-election shows that the Republican Party doesn’t really want black voters. He’s absolutely right. Beach’s response was to complain about how uppity these blacks were to complain about racism. Don’t they know there’s no such thing?! Meanwhile, Don Pesola has been eligible for Medicare and Social Security for several years. Moocher. Taker. Leech. 

One caller, with whom Beach had no quarrel, said that black people vote Democratic because they want freebies, and they refuse to vote Republican because it stands for “hard work”. No one challenged that, but it quite starkly proved Watson’s point. All done radio yakking, you lost the argument without Watson uttering a word. As if I had to explain it, the sentiment assumes that blacks are lazy and shiftless, want nothing but handouts, and that they’re allergic to “hard work,” and the party that stands for “hard work”. I can’t think of anything much more racist than that. As if “Obama cellphone” was the reason why people wanted to implement continue on the decidedly centrist path that President Obama had carved out for himself in the face of an ultra right-wing based on intransigence and childish freak-outs. Also, Benghazi where Obama “murdered 4 people”.

Watson made the point, which was completely backed up by the election results and earlier surveys, that the Republican Party has completely abandoned mainstream black voters. One caller – “Alex” identified himself as a black man and stated that the Republicans always talk about how black people don’t give them a shot, but that they never bother to go into the black community to see the problems, discuss solutions, and ask for votes. Beach sailed right over that observation and instead changed the subject,  complaining about how the community sometimes treats successful blacks like Clarence Thomas as “sell-outs” and “Uncle Toms”. Alex agreed that some black people who reject their own culture are indeed treated that way, but others (Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) are not. How any of that is Sandy Beach’s problem is anyone’s guess. Beach’s solution was that blacks should just snap out of it, I guess. It certainly was far removed from any topic that Rod Watson raised in his column. 

Watson wasn’t complaining about sell-outs in his column – that never came up. He was complaining about the very real fact that the Republican Party assumed that it could win this national race, even if it completely ignored black voters. And the working class. And the poor. And immigrants. And non-Cuban Latinos. (By the way, Florida Cubans went for Obama). And Muslims. And the rest of what Romney derisively dismissed as the “47%” of “takers” and “victims”. We have a Republican Party that, instead of seeking votes from traditional Democratic supporters, simply instead tries to suppress their vote. The Republican Party keeps just expecting these groups to simply waltz over to the party of Reince Priebus and offer their support because what – trickle-down economics will help lift them up? No, the Republican Party has to go to these groups, and first and foremost listen. If they just instantaneously dismiss complaints that they don’t want to hear, then their failure is their own. 

In the meantime, an old white guy on the radio named Don knows better than anyone what it means to be a black man in America. Do I think Beach is racist? No. But he sure did his best impression of one last night. 

Registration Fraud + Poll Tax

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The Sprouls with Mr. Romney

This isn’t as big a story in the mainstream media because it hasn’t hit Drudge and Fox – most likely because it involves a pricey, private, Caucasian consultancy rather than “new Black Panthers” or ACORN or just regular folks. 

You won’t see this story on Drudge and Fox because it can’t be spun to show Black people to be lawless savages who have the nerve to participate in our electoral process. 

But while the Republicans press for a poll tax to dissuade poor folks from voting (using “voter fraud” as a pretext), and although that sort of voter identity fraud has almost never happened, ever, we now have a brewing swing-state scandal where that consultancy hired first by the RNC – then fired when fraudulent registrations popped up in Florida, Colorado, and Virginia.  The Virginia Republican Committee quickly hired the firm that had been hiring workers for the fired consultancy, and somehow, some of those registrations have been found in a Pennsylvania dumpster. 

Strategic Allied is owned by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona political consultant for Republicans whose companies have faced charges in past elections of submitting forged forms and of dumping Democratic registrations. None of the charges were proved, and Sproul continues to do get-out-the-vote work for conservative causes this election.

In fact, the RNC has paid Sproul’s Strategic Allied $1.3 million over the course of the 2012 election to “register” voters. The RNC fired them after a bunch of fraudulent registrations popped up in Florida. Over the last nine years, that number has been $21.2 million.  

It also appears that the arrested former Strategic Allied worker, Colin Small, was re-hired by PinPoint Staffing, which Strategic Allied had used to hire people. The Virginia GOP in spite of – or because of – the allegations against Strategic Allied, retained PinPoint to provide staffers to “register” voters. Imagine you stop at your college’s student union to re-register to vote at your current address, and when the deadline passes you check to make sure everything went through, and nothing had changed. 

It’s a two-front war to help disenfranchise the poor and minorities, and therefore help Republican candidates. Long gone are the days of the GOP’s big tent – now, the tent door is shut, and it has reverted to agitation for a poll tax on the one hand, and ignoring or encouraging registration fraud on the other.  The Brad Blog goes into excruciating detail. 

Making Romney Relatable

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I can’t subject myself to Republican talking points for very long, and just 9 years ago, I was a registered Republican. In 2000, I volunteered for John McCain. I saw him as the last gasp of rational Republicanism against the Christianist conservative movement embodied by George W. Bush. The reasons why I can’t bring myself to watch or pay attention to gavel-to-gavel Republican convention coverage now are not dissimilar from the reasons why I don’t watch cable news anymore; we have a Democratic Party and a Batsh*t Crazy Party. 

But I watched Ann Romney’s and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s speeches yesterday. 

1. Both speakers worked from a TelePrompTer. When Obama uses one, Republicans mock it and imply that it is bad or inauthentic. What gives? 

2. Ann Romney seems like a nice lady. I have no doubt that she loves her husband very much, and that she’s very supportive of him. How odd it is, however, that in lieu of humanizing Mitt Romney, they sent Ann out to explain how human and relatable he is. She also rushed through her speech so quickly that it was as if she was allergic to words. 

3. Sarah Palin is completely absent from this shindig, and Romney’s choice to wear red – a color Palin also prefers – served almost as a subliminal message that the party will pander to the tea party – but only so much. Gone are the days when Palin would be a marquee speaker. 

4. Make no mistake: Mitt and Ann Romney never wanted for anything. They never had no money, and they never had to worry about how they would make ends meet. While Romney started her speech by talking about “love”, she quickly segued into a soliloquy about  the travails of the American bourgeoisie – a class to which she hasn’t belonged since meeting the candidate, her husband. She told us how she could relate to problems lots of mothers throughout American have – but for one. Money (or “resources”, if you prefer). These people have no idea. 

5. What I mean by the “no idea” quip above is this: Romney spoke about how humbly she and Mitt lived while together in college. I mean, they had a makeshift desk made out of sawhorses and a piece of wood! The difference, of course, is that the Romneys chose to live humbly, all the while cashing in Mitt’s stocks when money was needed. Choosing to live humbly is wildly different from having no choice but to be poor or worrying about money and jobs. 

6. A big applause line: Ann and Mitt have a “real marriage”. What’s the implication there? That the Obamas don’t? Was it a swipe at marriage equality/same-sex marriage? I have no idea, but it was a surprisingly passive-aggressive, accusatory thing to say in response to no suggestion that they didn’t. This was, as far as I can tell, nothing more than hatred.  Perhaps we should start questioning this, and demanding to see the long-form marriage certificate. 

7. Ann Romney said that Mitt didn’t have success handed to him. No, but I’d suggest that a guy whose father was governor, and the influential millionaire CEO of an auto manufacturer – a guy who attended the exclusive Cranbrook School (where he hilariously bullied the gay kids), and attended Stanford, Harvard, and BYU and went on to partner with consultant colleagues who raised millions to start Bain Capital had extraordinary opportunity – he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Was that handed to him? Perhaps not directly, but he was born into money and privilege, and his path to wealth and prominence was hardly steep. 

8. I happen to respect Chris Christie. I like his brash attitude, and I like the fact that he’s a bit of an asshole. I think most politicians are assholes anyway – it’s nice that he doesn’t try to hide that fact. You know where you stand with him, and you know where he stands. 

9. While Ann Romney had talked about love, Christie said we need to “choose respect over love”. That was awkward. 

10. Christie talked about how his mom had to the take the bus to various jobs – municipal bus. His dad worked at the Breyers plant – was it a union shop? Perhaps the Milk Drivers & Dairy Employees Union? Shame that people like Christie apparently came up from a working-class household that benefited from union wages, benefits, and collective bargaining, and would deny that for future generations. Unions for me, but not for thee. I think Democrats do a lousy job pushing back against union busting. If we’ve learned anything during the employment crisis of the current economic shocks, it’s that a job is certainly important, but there’s more to it than that – we’ve seemingly jettisoned any notion that the employee should have certain rights and privileges in addition to just getting a paycheck. What about a wage you can live off of? Why shouldn’t unions be allowed to represent workers to guarantee fair working conditions and labor practices? I don’t get why politicians are so proud of jobs, jobs, jobs without regard to how people are treated at those jobs.

11. Christie talked about wild spending. Ok, most federal spending overwhelmingly goes to the military. Let’s cut that in half. No administration in the last 30 years has been more spendthrift, more fiscally irresponsible, growing more government than those led by Republican chief executives.

12. Christie criticized Democrats for dividing Americans. No, this Republican Party can’t do that with a straight face and get away with it. Their entire platform is founded on class warfare, fear, and hatred. 

13. The speech Christie gave made no mention of Mitt Romney until the end. It was Christie’s opening to his 2016 run for President. 

14. Christie said America has/d the best health care system in the world. It doesn’t. Not even remotely, under any metric, and we spend wildly more than any other system on Earth. 

15. Obama leads by polls, Christie said. That sort of negates the talking point about how Obamacare is wildly unpopular, no? Cognitive dissonance and disingenuousness were everywhere last night. 

16. Shorter GOP: oh, my God, this European Kenyan usurper N0bama has destroyed America. Let’s quickly go back to the policies that led to the 2008 worldwide economic catastrophe from which the world is still hungover. 

Tonight, Mitt Romney will give his speech. Horserace-obsessed journos will breathlessly report on how big of a “bounce” Romney gets in the polls in the coming days. I will be listening to his tone, and the content of his speech. This is 1996 all over again – the Democratic President is quite vulnerable against an energized Republican base, and the GOP just picked Bob Dole 2.0 – the begrudgingly selected guy whom no one likes, but will say the right things to the right people and whose time it simply is to run. 

I’ll leave you with this scene from the season finale of Aaron Sorkin’s fantastic new series, “The Newsroom”. This illustrates the problem within the Republican Party. While the Democrats have fringe whackjobs, too, the party establishment hasn’t let them take over the show: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGAvwSp86hY]

The New Aristocracy (Let Them Drive Bentleys!)

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Since the Reagan Administration, it has been an article of faith among the Republican Party faithful that the best way to grow and help the economy is to cut taxes on the wealthy, and to otherwise make rich people’s lives more comfortable. As a result, the wealthy will spend more money and the wealth will “trickle down” to the middle class and poor.

Yet history shows us that the idea that our economy cannot thrive when the rich are highly taxed is patently false – the postwar boom years of 1946 – 1963 featured the wealthiest Americans paying up to 91 – 92% of their income to the IRS. Until 1982, the last time the wealthiest Americans paid less than a 63% rate was in 1931, when it was 25%.  The masters of the universe, undertaxed and unfettered, love plunging the world into massive depression spirals; we learn little from history. 

Reaganomics was not the panacea it’s remembered as.  The Reagan Administration dropped the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38.5%, but as a result income inequality has skyrocketed, and median household income has risen by a paltry 30%, while the richest Americans’ income has tripled or quadrupled in the same time frame. 

When your nation is built upon a mythology of equality not only at birth but in opportunity, this sort of thing – a system that is designed to comfort the comfortable and stymie regular people – tends to cause widespread anger and disgust.  We cut taxes on the people best able to afford them and propose the privatization, cuts, or elimination to social programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and other portions of our hodgepodge of a safety net. 

When you complain about how the system is now bought and paid for by the superwealthy – how the very rich have bought a political party, (if not the entire government), aided and abetted by an almost complete absence of campaign finance limitations, right wing America dismisses you as a Soviet communist engaging in Marxist class warfare. 

But class warfare is patriotic; class warfare is the very cornerstone upon which this country was founded. Our late 18th century revolt against Great Britain was a bourgeois revolution, which overthrew an oppressive colonial aristocratic superpower and established a constitutional representative republic based not on birthright and divine providence, but on law. Gentleman farmers, educated professionals, merchants, and traders united to create the first nation forged out of the ideas of the Enlightenment. 

Yet now, we are told that helping the bourgeoisie is communism, while a new aristocracy is being created and we are repeatedly told that assisting the aristocracy will help the common man. The facts, however, don’t bear that out. Why that isn’t part of the political discussion has a lot to do with misinformation and propaganda. The New Aristocracy and their paid-for media and politicians have in the past two generations mastered how to frame the argument – help us, help yourselves! 

The perfect crystallization of this was revealed this weekend. Republican / New Aristocrat Presidential candidate Mitt Romney attended fundraisers this past weekend in the Hamptons – the uberglitzy, exclusive, and home of ridiculously conspicuous overconsumption – the east coast playground of the New Aristocracy. The Los Angeles and New York Times interviewed attendees, and these quotes ought to be that new class’ “Let them Eat Cake” moment. 

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

and 

A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Habor, N.Y., long a favorite of the well-off and well-known in the Hamptons, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. “He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold-colored Mercedes as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.

Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!”

Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.

Oh, the common person is “getting it”. 

I’d very much like it if these people paid a bit more in taxes if it means that regular people get improved access to health care, shoring up Social Security, strengthening of Medicaid and expansion of Medicare, and to help pay for our many overseas military adventures – disproportionately fought by the children of the bourgeoisie and proletariat – and ultimately to help reduce the deficit. 

Fiscal responsibility begins when you ease and help lives that are tough. There’s a class war being waged, and it’s being aggressively promoted by the modern, New World version of titular nobility. 

 

Unraveling the Phony “Fast & Furious” Fury

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Short version: It’s all a big conspiracy to scare people into supporting some hypothetical, non-existent gun control effort Obama is planning. 

Alternate short version: Because the Republican Party is no longer about government, policy, or governing, it must gin up scandals like Whitewater, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Fast & Furious for electoral gain. 

Enjoy. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Unraveling the Phony "Fast & Furious" Fury

14 comments

Short version: It’s all a big conspiracy to scare people into supporting some hypothetical, non-existent gun control effort Obama is planning. 

Alternate short version: Because the Republican Party is no longer about government, policy, or governing, it must gin up scandals like Whitewater, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Fast & Furious for electoral gain. 

Enjoy. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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