Month: October 2011

My brother offers up some inconvenient truths:

Why are both parties declaring war on Medicare when both know that it could lead to their own political annihilation? The reason is simple. While both Democrats and Republicans fear the wrath of the AARP and the exploding ranks of hard-pressed seniors—to say nothing of lobbies like the American Hospital Association—Medicare’s relentless squeeze on the budget seems to party leaders to give them no choice but to attack the program’s spending regardless of the political cost. Medicare’s ever-expanding claims on the treasury threaten to crowd out nearly every other priority on either party’s agenda, from bullet trains and decent public schools to, yes, avoiding future tax increases and draconian cuts in the military.

The U.S. wouldn’t even face a structural deficit, much less have to endure the downgrading of its credit rating, were it not for the cost of Medicare (and, to a lesser extent, Medicaid). Just the projected increase in the cost of these two programs over the next twenty years is equivalent to doubling the Pentagon’s current budget, and there is no end in sight after that. By contrast, Social Security will rise only gradually, from 4.8 percent of GDP to 6.1 percent in 2035, and then taper off as the large Baby Boom generation passes. Meanwhile, according to the same CBO projection, all other government programs—the military, the courts, farm subsidies, Amtrak, infrastructure spending, education, and so on—are on course to shrink dramatically as a share of the economy, from 12.3 percent of GDP in 2011 to 8.5 percent in 2035. As others have observed, the federal government is not so gradually being transformed into a giant, and insolvent, health insurance company.

We can at least be thankful that both parties are sane enough to recognize the problem and brave enough to offer politically courageous proposals to solve it. But here’s the bad news: neither side’s solution is likely to work.

His solution? Get rid of fee-for-service medicine.

And they are not even part of Ron Paul’s campaign. They’re just common fucking sense. Human ecology in action at the grassroots level.

Read the following article, please: Dayton, Ohio, welcomes immigrants as policy point.

Here’s a sample.

On the same afternoon thousands of Hispanics in Alabama took the day off to protest the state’s strict new immigration law, Mexican-born Francisco Mejia was ringing up diners’ bills and handing containers piled with carnitas to drive-thru customers on the east side of Dayton.

His family’s Taqueria Mixteca is thriving on a street pockmarked with rundown buildings and vacant storefronts. It gets packed with a diverse lunchtime clientele of Hispanic laborers, white men in suits and other customers, white and black. “Business is very good,” Mejia said, smiling broadly between orders.

It’s the kind of success story that leaders in Dayton think offers hope for an entire city. It has adopted a plan not only to encourage immigrants to come and feel welcome here, but also to use them to help pull out of an economic tailspin.

Dayton officials, who adopted the “Welcome Dayton” plan unanimously Oct. 5, say they aren’t condoning illegal immigration; those who come here illicitly will continue to be subject to U.S. laws.

While states including Alabama, Georgia and Arizona, as well as some cities, have passed laws in recent years cracking down on illegal immigrants, Dayton officials say they will leave that to federal authorities and focus instead on how to attract and assimilate those who come legally.

—snip—

Mayor Gary Leitzell told the city commission before the vote that immigrants bring “new ideas, new perspectives and new talent to our workforce. … To reverse the decades-long trend of economic decline in this city, we need to think globally.”

Hard-hit for years by the struggles of U.S. manufacturing, particularly in the auto industry, the recession pounded Dayton, which as the Wright Brother’s hometown calls itself “the birthplace of aviation.”

Thousands of jobs were lost with the crippling 2009 exodus to Georgia of NCR (formerly National Cash Register), one of Dayton’s signature corporations, after 125 years, and by the 2008 shutdown of a General Motors plant in suburban Moraine.

Dayton’s unemployment is nearly 11 percent, 2 percent higher than the national average, while population has fallen below 142,000, down 15 percent from 2000. Meanwhile, the city’s official foreign-born population rose 57 percent, to 5,102, from 2000 to 2010, according to census figures.

City leaders aiming to turn Dayton around started examining the immigrant population: Indian doctors in hospitals; foreign-born professors and graduate students at the region’s universities; and owners of new small businesses such as a Turkish family’s New York Pizzeria on the city’s east side and Hispanic-run car lots, repair shops and small markets. They say immigrants have revitalized some rundown housing, moving into and fixing up what had been vacant homes.

—snip—

Read it?

Good.

Now go read the colloquies between Booman, myself and a couple other posters under my recent article So Ron Paul is a racist, eh? A fascist too, I suppose? Get real.

More below the fold.
Ron Paul has been leftiness knee-jerk tarred and feathered as a “racist” because he thinks that the aims of the federal Civil Rights Act should have been left to the states to decide.

And here is funky little Dayton, Ohio (Believe it, been there. Even in so-called “good” times Dayton was more Bronx than it was Paris, to say the least.), free-marketing right on past the anti-immigration cities and states using simple common sense to do so. People want to work? People who come from a work-oriented culture…any work-oriented culture…people who have more than proven that all they need is an even chance to succeed? OK, let’s see what happens if we give them that chance. (I got news fer ya… it’s working. It’s working inna Bronx; it’s working in Dayton and…give it time…it’s working in cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Oakland too. And in smaller places like Bethlehem PA and White Plains, NY as well. I know. Been there, seen that.)

Meanwhile, the Alabamas and Arizonas of this country pass laws that will discourage a huge percentage of the real working classes of this country from even stepping foot over their borders. Nice work, fools.

Believe me, the “real working classes of this country” are and have historically been comprised of about 50+% 1st, 2nd and sometimes 3rd generation immigrants from other lands whether they were Jewish, Irish, Italian. Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Ghanian or from anywhere else in the world. “Legal” or not so legal. The other 50%? Well more than half of it is made up of African-Americans who have been stuck in in the working classes by legally mandated or de facto racism for 300+ years.

What is it that Ron Paul is saying, again?

From the comments section of my above-linked article:

I repeat…in one state (or town or corporation) that enforced segregation and in another that did not today, the idea that (As Ron Paul has stated it):

In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees — while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.

would function quite well.

It functions quite well even now.

Take say Apple Corp…by far the most successful corporation in the U.S. over the past several years. Does that statement of Ron Paul’s not apply on every level to the running of that company? “…choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.”

That sounds about right.

Now say Apple had chosen not to hire the many Asian and Jewish people that work for the company. Or females. Or Hispanics and African-Americans. What then? What if the Apple stores had segregated Genius Bars or simply refused to sell to certain segments of the population? Not so “Platonic” now, is it? Sounds pretty damned practical to me.

Ron Paul seems to think that left to its own devices, the society would have ended segregation by purely economic means. We’ll never know now, but it makes sense to me. Those northern states that began to see the light and included the vast talents of non-European workforces into their systems at equal educational opportunity and equal pay would eventually have economically outstripped the states that did not do so, and the necessity of competition would have brought us…all of the states… perhaps even further in this regard than we have come so far. But…we’ll never know, because that did not happen.

Instead a top-heavy federal apparatus became even more top-heavy on its journey to the present day breakdown that we are now witnessing.

Ron Paul’s vision?

Strip that top-heavy apparatus down and let competition dictate what happens.

Could he be disastrously wrong?

Sure.

But another sort of disaster is already well upon us. Somebody come up with a better idea?

Anybody?

Please!!!???

And the silence of the sheeple ensues.

Baa baa baa.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, the equally “top-heavy apparatus” of the mass media…owned by precisely the same interests that own the federal government, bet on it, and operating in precisely the same clomp-clomp-clomping, clunkily mechanized manner as that federal government as well (It’s the only way something that big can operate. An assembly line culture. )…completely ignores the only candidate who is making any sense whatsoever out there in the political world and the left follows suit, swallowing whole the so-called “left wing” media’s accusations that Ron Paul is a racist, a reactionary and a libertarian flake job.

So it goes.

When the chickens truly come home to roost here…and they almost definitely will do so, eventually if not sooner…this little recession that we are now experiencing will come to be seen as only the beginning of our eventual “adjustment.” If we do not elect a president with some real vision instead of playing the good cop/bad cop, Demopublican/Republicrat game yet again, y’all will be able to look back on your ruined neighborhoods and the stark reality of your lost savings, say “Aw, snap!!! If we had only known!!!” and then sink right back into the same morass of sleepleness that got you there in the first place.

Or, of course…although I no longer hold much hope for the success of this second idea…you could:

WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

Thank you and have a very nice day.

Station WTFU once again signing off.

(I got work to do, too!!!)

Later…

AG

Okay, this ad is pretty comical. I love how it promotes smoking.

If Herman Cain didn’t have a long history of being a conservative, I’d begin to suspect that he’s just pulling the GOP’s chain. One thing is for sure; he’s not taking this race seriously. And, yet, he has an 8-10 point advantage in the Iowa polls; he’s in second place in New Hampshire; he’s up by ten points in South Carolina, and he’s tied with Romney nationally.

And he’s done this without really even trying.

A recent news item disclosed that Melody Barnes, the Domestic Policy Adviser to President Obama will be leaving her White House post at the end of the year. Many others have been expressing surprise at this announcement, but for me this is welcome news. The major reason President Obama is struggling politically at this time is HIS BAD CHOICE IN ADVISORS from day one in the White House. I am certain that Barnes, Jarrett, Axelrod, and Plouffe are all wonderful pleasant people. However, I am just sure, as has been well demonstrated; they are all woefully politically naive in terms of Washington Politics. These folks including the President are all “Soft Democrats”, when what was needed to properly manage the unique situation of a Black President interacting with a white Congress was a core of “Hard Democrats”. Actually Vice President Joe Biden is the closest person to a true “Hard Democrat” currently in the White House. More Hard and Soft stuff below the fold.
Let me digress for a moment to explain the difference between a “Soft Democrat” and a “Hard Democrat”. A “Soft Democrat” is a Democrat whose basic character is by nature mainly passive tending towards favoring strength in intellectualism and while maintaining a rather resigned tolerance towards the practical side of issues. Aggressive tactics and strategic planning are considered to be non-essential in the mind of the “Soft Democrat”, who believes that all disagreements will be eventually resolved by sober compromise between all parties concerned. Simply put a “Hard Democrat” is by nature the exact mirror image opposite of the “Soft Democrat”. A “Hard Democrat” is by nature politically aggressive whose character tends to value the realistic practical advantages over his Party’s enemies. These advantages can be anything that secures the unconditional cooperation of the political foe. Needless to say the “Hard Democrat” is constantly planning strategies for the present and the future, and deems it unacceptable weakness not to be prepared for virtually any circumstance. Over the decades the Republicans have been able to influence the creation of a majority of “Soft Democrats” in the Congress. This they did by encouraging the establishment of political cultism among “Soft Democrat” leaders in congress. These were people like Byrd, Kennedy, Stevenson, Harkin, and many more. During this period of time the “Hard Democrats” were kept out of the leadership positions of the Democratic Party, thus allowing the Democratic Party to replace the Republican Party as the Party of Reaction, and the Republicans became the Party of proactivity.
 

Why were “Hard Democrats” needed? Simply because from the time that Obama won the election the Republicans made it clear that they were going to play “hard ball” with this president until the day he leaves office. And they demonstrated it over and over and over again at every opportunity. A good experienced crew of “Hard Democrats” would have taken no more than 6 months to have squeezed the political life out of these bombastic Republicans. During the interregnum, President-elect Obama should have started an exhaustive search to locate the “Hard Democrats” needed as his principle advisors in the White House. Instead Obama spent this precious time basking in his historic win and simply settled for a Chicago connection to guide his choice of critical advisors. The goal of an effective senior advisor is to work tirelessly to create strategies that always keep their Boss, the President, ahead of his enemies and detractors in the vast political arena of Washington D.C. As a senior advisor, you must feel deeply and irreconcilable that each political failure inflicted on your Boss is a personal repudiation of your own personal capabilities. Methinks that the Obama White House is now finally aware that “The West Wing” TV drama is definitely not the REAL WORLD!.

The Vatican is getting pretty radical in its old age. Their Justice and Peace Department issued a report today entitled: “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority.” It’s kind of far to the left.

It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

Asked at a news conference if the document could become a manifesto for the movement of the “indignant ones”, who have criticised global economic policies, Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department, said: “The people on Wall Street need to sit down and go through a process of discernment and see whether their role managing the finances of the world is actually serving the interests of humanity and the common good. “We are calling for all these bodies and organisations to sit down and do a little bit of re-thinking.”

The Wall Street traders are wondering why in the hell they should be worried about the interests of humanity. They’re trying to make a buck.

Walter Shapiro explains how we’re supposed to pick our presidents:

This is how presidential vetting traditionally works. The press pack pounces on the logical fallacies in a candidate’s positions and the shakiness of his resume. Party elites and top fundraisers then decide, if they have not already, that any candidate subjected to this kind of non-ideological media assault is unelectable. And eventually voters—especially when the calendar moves beyond activist-dominated Iowa—get the message that they are trying to elect a president and not merely thumbing their noses at the establishment.

That pretty well explains what happened to Howard Dean, although I don’t think he committed too many logical fallacies. It’s also interesting to see why Shapiro fears that the vetting process won’t work this time and the Republicans might actually nominate a doofus like Herman Cain.

Aiding Cain—and potentially defying past election cycles—is the fact that Republican voters are highly skeptical of the media: 72 percent of conservative Republicans and 62 percent of all Republicans believe that there is “a lot” of bias in news coverage, according to a national survey by the Pew Research Center.

In other words, our Establishment Media has little influence over what’s left of the Republican Party. The more they diss a Sarah Palin or a Herman Cain, the more popular those candidates become. At least, that’s the theory. In truth, people came to hate Sarah Palin with a white-hot passion. But the media probably kept her popular for longer than she deserved.

I’m ambivalent about Shapiro’s worldview. I think the media does effectively vet the candidates, weeding out the lunatics. And that serves a needed function, I guess. But the media does this very, very inefficiently and it tends to obsess about superficial stuff like whether a candidate connects with the people. Too often, the media tries to weed out candidates because they have some unorthodox view rather than that they’re totally unprepared to be president. And the media is actually terrible about vetting the actual nominees. They are too afraid of being biased to fairly arbitrate who is telling the truth.

It’s easy to mock Michele Bachmann’s position on Libya because in greater context she has opposed every element of the Arab Spring. She is clearly wetting her pants at the prospect that average Arab citizens will have some actual say in the policies of their governments. She has explicitly said that America was better off when we could control Arab countries by cozying up to repressive dictators. She reminds me of a hard-line Soviet watching the breakup of the Eastern Bloc.

Yet, we ought to be a little more humble. I am seeing a lot the same attitude on the left that I saw on the right after we invaded Iraq and toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. Anyone who questioned the wisdom of the war was laughed out of town. “Are you saying we were better off with Saddam in power?” they asked. “Look at how few casualties we had,” they boasted. “The Iraqi people have been liberated,” they predicted.

No one talks about the initial stages of the Iraq war anymore. Everything that matters happened after Hussein was driven out of power.

What’s disturbing about Bachmann’s position is that she opposes our intervention in Libya for all the wrong reasons. She opposes democracy in Arab countries because she doesn’t like Arab public opinion. She doesn’t care about Libyans. Her opposition isn’t based in any humanitarian concern about the risks of creating a power vacuum in a highly tribal oil-rich state with no democratic institutions or history. She isn’t concerned about our responsibility for flooding the country with weapons that are now in the hands of militias that do not answer to any central authority.

She’s predictably wrong about everything. But it’s way too early to be mocking people who thought the U.S. should stay out of the Libyan uprising. And if Libya turns out a lot better than Iraq did, part of the reason why will be that the president was smart about limiting our risks and responsibilities.

Anne Laurie’s point isn’t all that clear to me, but she raises a question. Who would be in a Mitt Romney cabinet? And who, in particular, would be serving him as National Security Advisor? I guess there is a list of likely candidates, most of whom served in the Bush administration. Almost all of them meet my definition of crazy. Several of them meet my definition of criminal. I feel confident in saying that the vast majority of people on that list want war with Iran, just like they wanted a war with Iraq, and for the same reasons.

I remember when I visited the ruins of the World Trade Center in early October 2001. I looked out at the vast debris field and the cranes and bulldozers looked like Matchbox cars. I thought to myself that they would never be able to cart away all that debris. But they did it in under a year.

When Bush left office in the midst of the worst financial collapse of our lifetimes, with two festering wars, a discredited Justice Department, and the country’s reputation in tatters, I thought that the new president would never be able to clean it all up. And he hasn’t. But the idea that we might take all the garbage bags that have been gathered at the curb, and we would rip them open and spew it all back into the street?

Only small children do such foolish things.

Oh, we’re going to play this game again?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said he didn’t know if President Obama’s birth certificate was genuine.

In an interview with Parade Magazine, Perry said he has no reason to think otherwise that the president was born in the United States. But pushed further for a more definitive answer, Perry said he couldn’t be sure that Obama’s long-form birth certificate, which was released earlier this year, was real.

When told that he had seen the birth certificate, Perry questioned that, according to a transcript of the interview put out by the magazine.

“I don’t know. Have I?” said Perry.

Asked if he believed in the document that’s been released, the governor said he didn’t know.

“I don’t know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night,” Perry said. “He doesn’t think it’s real.”

There are a few things about Rick Perry that I am not sure are real. Let’s start with his hair and teeth. How about the name of his hunting ground: Niggerhead. Is that for real?

His credentials to be president? Not real.

Debating skills? Non-existent.

Grasp of the issues? Illusory.

Taking advice from Donald Trump? Priceless.