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Friday, October 03, 2008

The Sarah Palin Chronicles. Part 2: Joe Six-pack.

The Myth of Joe Six-Pack.
Enough!
I am tired of hearing the expression used by politicians to show us they understand our problems out here in reality. At its best its just condescending. At its worse its a cynical political ploy to manipulate the hard working typical American to vote for something that is usually against "Joe six-pack's" best interest.
Does anyone think that John McCain is hanging out with "Joe Six-Pack" in any of his nine houses? Give me a break! McCain is hanging out with "John Champagne toast at brunch on the veranda over the Billion dollar bail out." If McCain and the wicked witch from the north get into the White House it will be "Joe four-pack" because no one will be able to afford a six-pack anymore.

When ever a politician uses the phrase, "Joe six-pack" what are they telling us? I'll tell you what there telling us. They want the government to function on a level that someone who comes home everyday and downs a six-pack of beer in front of the TV would understand? Is that really such a good idea? Shouldn't our leaders inspire us to be more? Shouldn't our leaders not talk down to us but attempt to reach for something more than the lowest common denominator?
Sarah Palin is folksy, don't cha know, but I don't want someone a heart beat away from the most powerful office in the world using the same judgement as a guy who drinks a six pack every night.
Do you?
We need leaders to start saying things we need to hear. Not pander to base instincts in troubled times. You want an example? 9/11 didn't "Change the world forever" as you have heard a million times before. We should have a leader who can calmly say to the American people, 9/11 didn't change the world. It just made us a part of it.
Instead, it has been used as an excuse to do everything and anything accept get a permanent monument at ground zero.
I really don't get why that hasn't been done yet. You know why a bare hole like an open wound is still there? Because if there was a building or a monument where the towers fell then it couldn't be used as a back drop anymore to scare the shit out of "Joe six-pack."
Its a shitty truth but its a truth.

In the conservative world Intelligence is equated with being a snob or being elite while gut decisions and no curiosity are seen as a virtue. Ironically, they probably came up with this debate tactic in a think tank staffed with people who graduated from ivy league colleges. It is yet another irony among the stunning universe of ironies that the modern conservative ideology is full of. How the hell they became the party associated with Jesus I guess God only knows. Correct me if I am wrong but I think Jesus is the guy who said we should all share equally among each other.
Socialism!
He was also homeless by choice with long hair. How many Republicans do you see that look like him let alone truly emulate his teachings? To them, he really has been a "profit."

Sarah Palin is a stunt. A gimmick meant to make McCain look like a guy who understands what the average working adult in America goes through everyday. The irony here is, John McCain is married to a woman who will inherit the Budweiser fortune. So he could buy everyone in America a six-pack of beer but instead he decided to give $700 Billion dollars to the guys on Wall Street who just lost "grandpa six-pack" his retirement savings. And yes, I don't think Obama should of voted for it either. In fact, he missed a wonderful opportunity to be a genuine maverick by standing up and saying so.
Now if you will excuse me I have to put this six-pack of root beer in the fridge and put my feet up. This is one tired Joe=)

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

This guy is a TOOL!

As the economic crisis drags on FOX news is doing what they always do; spinning the bullshit. Listen to this Dude gleefully tell us that the blame for this rests squarely on the poor. Then he broadens that to the Democrats.
It is true that an under addressed part of this whole mess is the idea of personal responsibility. A lot of people bought homes they could not afford. But they didn't just walk into those banks and demand money for a home way outside their price range. First a lot of very wealthy REPUBLICANS lobbied the government to do away with those pesky regulations.
Then those banks started an aggressive marketing strategy based on one of the foundations we all heard growing up; The American dream! That is the goal of every red blooded American who works hard and plays by the rules. Right? Buying your own home. When an inch thick packet of paper work all written in legal jargon is drop in front of you, you ask questions and I bet a lot of those people did ask, "Can we really afford this?" and I am fairly positive that most of the time those bankers said, "Of course you can!"
The President went on TV and directly told the American people that one of the fruits of REPUBLICAN rule was that they were going to make it an ownership society. He gave a speech and talked about doing away with the rules that kept so many poor people from living the American dream. Then the economy started to sour. Maybe it was the failed war of choice against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 for 10 Billion a month. Maybe it was the oil speculators that drove the cost of filling up your gas tank through the roof. Maybe it was the net loss of a few million jobs from the economy. Maybe it was financing our national debt with loans from our biggest trade competitor, China. Maybe it was the government allowing typical banks to merge with investment banks that played fast and loose with other peoples money. Maybe it was the Billions of dollars paid out to wall street hot shots. Whatever the reason a lot of people couldn't make it. They walked away and defaulted on loans no responsible banker should of asked people to sign. Maybe there is enough blame to go around but the poor out number the rich and I feel a day of reckoning approaching fast, Greg.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

My Two Cents or: Thats what we all have left

Right now you and I and everyone in America are living in history. This is an extraordinary time to be alive on the planet. We live in a culmination of philosophy, technology and ideology. When they write the History books I think a good title would be, America at the turn of the 21st Century: The triumph of ideology over common sense.

Consider all that the Republicans have accomplished with George Bush in just under eight years.

They have left the United States Government with the biggest budget deficit ever. Larger than all other Presidents combined!

They deregulated everything resulting in the greatest finical crisis in this country since the great depression. Yesterday, on word that the Government would not bail out rich bankers who already stole your money with more of our tax dollars, the Down Jones suffered its greatest single day drop in history. 777 points down or a trillion dollars of wealth evaporated around the globe. Remember when they talked about privatizing social security? Can you imagine the scope of this disaster if they had already gotten their greedy hands on more of Americas 401k’s and retirement funds? Of course this is a Republican mess. Bush spent more than a few of his rare speeches to America talking about creating an “Ownership society.” He talked about easing regulations on the banks and making it easier for people with bad credit, low credit or no credit to buy a home with no money down.

We have approximately 150,000 troops occupying a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at the price of 10 Billion dollars a month. This is on top of the deficits they already have. The entire Iraq war has been kept ‘of the books.’ When they say they need supplemental budgets passed they mean there are two books. One for all the other stuff they ran up and one for the war.

There are now more independent contractors in Iraq than U.S. service men. They waged this war with a for profit mind set never stopping to think that the money paid to these private contractors was borrowed from China.

Corruption cases involving high level government workers with direct access to the White House has never been higher. The CIA’s number 3 man was just arrested today for steering business to a friends company. He did this by creating fake companies as cover. You know, just like ENRON did when they deregulated the energy markets and stole billions from California with an engineered crisis.

There is a long list of Republicans either in jail now or awaiting trial for bribery, theft, collusion, conspiracy and fraud.

America, you have to wake up now and take a look at what ruling this nation under an ideology and not under the rule of law has done to you. Logic got thrown out the window in favor of making money for a very small very elite group of men whose morality is something like an acid dream from the Old Testament. Yet, John McCain, the “new” cheerleader for the Republican Party wants nothing to change. Everything that Bush has done he wants to do bigger. Course a man his age has a 1 in 4 chance of dying before he makes it to the end of his first year in office. That would mean Sarah Palin would become our President. I have heard no intelligent person raise a cry against this because she is a woman. It is clear from the few interviews we have been allowed to have with her that she is so far out of her depth that it is an embarrassment to all of America that a person with nothing to intellectually offer us in a time of need has been nominated by a major party. When Katie Couric nails you in an interview it might be time to seriously think about what the Republicans want you to swallow. Either a man who has publicly and proudly stated that he has never sent a e-mail, doesn’t really understand how the economy works and sang “Bomb bomb bomb. Bomb bomb Iran” will be President or a person who went to 5 colleges in 6 years who claims foreign policy expertise because Russia is so close to Alaska will be.

Is it so ridiculous to want a leader who is at least as smart as I am? In fact, I want a leader who is smarter than I am. I want a leader who knows what the Internet is. I want a leader who understands what the constitution is. I want a leader who knows what poverty feels like.

Obama is a politician. By definition that means his words should be scrutinized and his promises consider less than meaningful. But when you put him next to John McCain, anyone who is serious about the future cannot logically expect McCain to lead America into the 21st. Century. McCain has been in Washington as a professional politician for 26 years. He was part of another famous banking disaster in the 80’s known as the Keating five where the U.S. Government bailed out the savings and loan business because five very influential men operated it without regulation. In other words, the last time John McCain didn’t understand how the economy worked it cost the Tax Payer a couple of Billion dollars already.

You can look at this any way you want but it is already pretty obvious that the ideology of a ultra conservative splinter group with in the Republican party did away with rules and regulations so the rich could get richer while the poor die in Iraq for oil that gets idled away in SUV’s in the parking lots of middle America mega churches. The republicans have failed spectacularly. Not just because I say so, but by their own standards. They are the party of fiscal responsibility and smaller Government? Not from where I have been watching these last eight years. They are the party that opposes logic in the face of scientific evidence. NASA, the EPA and officials inside the FDA have all come forward and exposed the level of outright censorship the White House has insistent upon when it came to our environment, our food and drugs and our collective safety as a species on this planet. Think that’s too dramatic? They invented a program where power plants could put more pollution into the air. They named it the Clear skies initiative. They devised a way for logging companies to take more trees from our national forests under a program called the healthy forest initiative. When we first went into Iraq the operation was ironically titled, Operation Infinite Liberty. O.I.L. Like Orwell’s 1984, whatever they tell you means the exact opposite of what they are doing.

Electing Obama President is not an emotional grasp at change. It is the only logical step we as a people can take to change the direction eight years of Bush has put us on. Under Bush, gas prices rose faster than at any other time in Americas history. Under Bush, our money has lost value. Under Bush, we have lost our moral authority as a super power in a very troubled world. I am not waiting for history to pass judgment on the Republicans and the ruins they are leaving us with. You don’t have to wait either. You can vote for change or you can vote for more of the same. We don’t know what a half black Harvard Graduate in constitutional law who was raised by a single mother will do if we reward him with the most powerful office in the world. But I am willing to take the chance rather than stick with what has been done. George Bush and the Neo-Conservatives hijacked America while we were all watching reality TV. They hijacked it, turned it abruptly to the right and just like every business George Bush ever got his privileged hands on, flew it into the ground.

Vote Obama. It is too important to let another out of touch old guy get his hands on this country again. If you want change America you have to stop doing what you have done and try something else. Perhaps we should vote for the President based on the color of his skin. When the color of your hair and you skin match, maybe you shouldn’t be President.

Just one more thing before I sign off on this post. If you want a clear metaphor for where we are as a nation mediate on this. yesterday when all other stocks dropped one company's stock actually rose. The Campbel Soup company. You know how you keep hearing the talking heads keep saying stuff like not since the great depression? Well, get ready for the soup Kitchen folks.