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By Kevin Horn: My views on life about atheism, religion, comic books, movies, politics and all things Macintosh. BBG stands for Bear Byte Graphics.
"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!"
I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
While the Administration has quickly rallied to help Wall Street, it has ignored the needs of the declining middle class. Since President Bush has been in office the wealthiest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top one-tenth of one percent now earn more income than the bottom 50 percent of Americans and the top one percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Incredibly, the richest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion during the Bush presidency.So sign the petition and let's see if we can put a stop to this insanity and not give Bush his final, and biggest, victory.
Having mismanaged the economy for 8 years while continually insisting that, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” the Bush Administration, six weeks before an election, wants the middle class of this country to bail out Wall Street to the tune of one trillion dollars. Meanwhile the wealthiest people, those who have benefited most from Bush’s policies and are in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all. This is absurd.
Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.He's a heavyweight in the field. And he said something today on the Rachel Maddow show that scared me and made me realize what I forgot to mention yesterday in my post on the economy; namely, that we could be heading for another Great Depression just as bad, if not worse as in 1932. This is something I've worried about for years because anyone who knows even a little bit about the economy and what the idiot Republicans were doing to it were worried. Another Great Depression is, of course, the worst of all possible outcomes so I always thought it wasn't too likely (I hoped). But Krugman said today that if the Fed hadn't bailed out AIG we might have been only days away for a GD. Days. This from his blog 2 days ago:
Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.
And there’s a lesson there for those ready to hear it: government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.If everyone loses faith in the ability of banks to borrow money then the whole system comes crashing down because all credit will end which will bring most business to a halt and put all of us out of work. In 1932 they had an unemployment rate of 24%, we could see that again.
Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper” — that is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.
Free-market extremists brought us this needless economic collapse. Here's a rundown of the mistakes we've made and the reforms we need now.Free-market extremists, otherwise known as Republicans. And one of the people most at fault is Alan Greenspan. His entire philosophy since he became head of the fed is to do what he could to make the economy business friendly. Here's an article by Digsby on how Greenspan created this current crisis, Digsby quotes Newsweek's Michael Hirsh:
This mess is mostly a titanic failure of regulation. And the largest share of blame goes back to one man: Alan Greenspan. People mainly fault the former Fed chief, who once enjoyed a near-saintly reputation because of his reputed "feel" for market conditions, for ushering in an era of easy credit that accelerated the mortgage mania. But the much bigger problem was Greenspan's Ayn Randian passion for regulatory minimalism. Under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act enacted by Congress in 1994, the Fed was given the authority to oversee mortgage loans. But Greenspan kept putting off writing any rules. As late as April 2005, when things were seriously beginning to go wrong, he was saying that subprime lending would work out for the common good—without government interference.There were others responsible, Phil Gramm comes to mind - you know, McCain's economic adviser - but the heart of it all goes back to Reagan's election in 1980. That's when the idea that government was evil and regulations come from government and are evil too. McCain himself is one of those free-market extremists who has supported de-regulation every time he could in his 26 year senate career. But now he likes regulation (hahah).
Notice that the minute there is a disaster of any sort, Old Man Winter responds in two ways -- the disaster is either not actually happening and you're just whining, or, he's going to make sure it never happens again. And how exactly is he going make sure of that? Well, he says he's going to appoint a commission -- that's right, a GOVERNMENT commission. If that sounds like more of that bureaucracy he's going to shrink, it's because it is. And what do you think that commission's going to recommend? Hold on...wait for it...here it comes....REGULATION. You heard right, Seniletor McCaine and Governor I-Can-See-Russia-From-Here would officially like to change their position. It seems they've awakened to the stunning realization that "government interference" is exactly what's needed to do all that changin' and reformin' they gon' do.It's amazing to me that McCain can suddenly change the position he's held for 26 years and get away with it. 48 hours ago he was The Deregulator (I keep picturing McCain's face with the skin gone on half of it with the metal robot showing underneath). Now - suddenly - deregulation is the problem and he is going to start regulating as soon as he gets to Washington! Does that mean he's been WRONG for the past 26 years and now - suddenly - sees the light? Perhaps now he will also see the wisdom of raising taxes on the rich and government run health care? Only if he needs to do that to win the election, because all McCain really wants is to be president, I don't think he cares much about what he will do once he's there.
"Let's be clear," Obama said, "what we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed."This is the most important thing Obama has said so far in this campaign, and he seems to be the only one involved, including media and economists, that has really seen the full picture and said it out loud.
Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You're an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we're going to agree to disagree. This isn't one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I'm not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren't scared out of your freakin' mind, then you're mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.He nailed it an didn't hold any punches. I recommend cruising his site and reading some other posts.
We've become trained to look for the man behind the mask, for in real life there is no one whose emotional life is confined to a lifelong, passionate love for his high school sweetheart wife and their two children, an undying appreciation for the sacrifice of soldiers, awe before the flag and concern for the future of the middle class. Oh, and a burning passion for reducing dependence on foreign oil 30 percent by 2018 and for full federal funding for special education. Because that's the standard we set for our presidential candidates; anyone who reveals himself to have other things going on inside, to be more human than that, never makes it this far.
But I'm not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn't-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather's sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn't, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.
Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it's the same thing -- but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story -- putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now.
“The richest 1 percent of U.S. households now owns 34 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent of the population. All of us who are in that bottom 90 percent share an interest in having an economy that works for everyone. Rather than dividing ourselves by race, we should unite for an America that benefits the vast majority — regardless of the complexion of that majority.”And it’s beyond absurd that the 90% at the bottom are so easily controlled and manipulated by the propaganda of that 1%. In a land where we can all vote they should be following us.
Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, Center for Community Change, Albany Times-Union, September 2, 2008.
Sept. 9, 2008 | John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy." But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.
We believe that access to health care and long-term financial security are basic needs that all Americans share.Sounds nice, doesn’t it? All of us united in doing the best for our country and the people in it. There is one basic flaw in that reasoning - the entire reason we don’t have universal health care or financial security right now is because the Republicans have been fighting it tooth and nail for the last 40 years. How do you ally yourself with the very people who have caused this problem in the first place?
"In Dick Morris' defense," Stewart said, "he is a lying sack of sh*t."
EAST LANSING, Michigan - Who says science doesn't turn people on? Kate McAlpine is a rising star on YouTube for her rap performance — about high-energy particle physics.Follow the link to read more but the best part is the video itself:
Her performance has drawn a half-million views so far on YouTube.
The 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer raps about the Large Hadron Collider, the groundbreaking particle accelerator that has been built in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.