We, the PEOPLE!!

The economy is continuing to show increased signs of recovery.  People are actually spending more than they have for quite some time.  Consumer confidence is up, as are retail sales.  More consumer spending translates into more demand for products which translates into more jobs to make those products.  Considering all the positives, why is the stock market in a tumble at the beginning of the busiest consumer buying season of the year? (hint:  driving off a mountain)

If you follow such things as the stock market, you know that in the four years since Barack Obama was first elected president (in to the middle of the worst economic free-fall since the Great Depression), the stock market has doubled its value.  It has almost completely regained the losses caused by the housing and banking debacles of the Great Recession.  That recession was largely caused by the deregulation of the financial industry, which actually started during the Clinton administration but was then put on steroids by Bush and his republican-controlled congress.  Additionally, republicans also gave us two unfunded wars and an unfunded prescription drug program, as well as two huge unfunded tax cuts mostly for the very rich.  In other words, they loved free spending but not paying the bills.

Although oversimplified, all of this coupled with an extremely partisan atmosphere in Washington DC over the past two years produced the “fiscal cliff”, a term describing what happens on January 2, 2013,  if congress hasn’t agreed on a bi-partisan deficit-reduction plan.  That failure will automatically trigger $500 billion in both spending cuts and tax increases.  Part of the tax increase will be caused by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut.  The average American family might see an additional $2200 a year as a result.  It affect everyone including the middle class and the working poor.

Enter Grover Norquist, an extremely conservative right wing ideologue and very well paid  lobbyist who believes the less government, the better.  He is on record advocating that the US government should be shrunk by revenue starvation to the size it was before Teddy Roosevelt became the 26th president of the USA in 1901.  In fact, he has said that “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

In 1985, Norquist started Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), an organization initially intended to simply oppose tax increases and to reduce government.  It has actually grown into a very-well-funded conservative lobbying group that terrorizes elected republican officials and GOP candidates for office by blackmailing them into signing an inflexible pledge to never raise taxes or even tax revenues by any legislative action whatsoever for any reason under any circumstances.  Those who would resist this blackmail are threatened by ATR, which promises to throw massive amounts of negative publicity at them at election/re-election time if they refuse to sign the pledge.

ATR funds this political terrorist activity with financial donations from unnamed donors, many of whom are very wealthy businessmen and corporations and remain anonymous because ATR is legally a non-profit corporation and does not have to reveal its donors.  And even though president Obama won re-election on a platform that included raising tax rates on the wealthiest 2% of Americans who make $250,000 or more per year, Norquist doesn’t care.  He demands unyielding loyalty, or suffer the consequences.

Norquist and anyone else who chooses to honor this idiotic Norquist pledge over the next four weeks have a problem:  If they hold fast, a deficit reduction deal will not get done in congress.  These self-same anti-tax GOP idiots will then be directly responsible for the biggest single tax increase in the history of the USA on January 2, 2013.  Grover Norquist will have succeeded in scaring (terrorizing) enough members of congress to block a deal with democrats to raise tax requirements on only the wealthiest 2% of Americans, choosing instead to drive right over the fiscal cliff, causing the most massive tax increase on ALL Americans in history!!

So much for the pledge, huh?

Norquist’s tactics are really not much different from those used by the Taliban in isolated regions to get people to bow to their will.  The only difference is that Norquist uses money the way the Taliban uses guns and knives.

To their credit, some republican senators have recently blown off the pledge, stressing that the health of the USA is more important that Norquist’s lunatic manta.  In response, Norquist promises to retaliate against them.  But if history is any example, Norquist’s influence might have already peaked and just might be losing its grip.

Remember the 1980′s “Moral Majority“?

Try finding them now. 

…We’re taking a holiday break this week, thankful that Obama won and the fanatical fringe lost. 

We’ll be back next week with We, the PEOPLE!!    In the meantime, maybe that lunatic fringe will self-deport.   

Just when some people thought it was safe to turn their full attention to congress’s efforts to avoid the fiscal cliff…

…and just when they thought that congress would turn its full attention to avoiding the fiscal cliff…

….and just when they thought they could relax, free from the long bitter presidential campaign and its non-stop mega-money political ads….

….and just when they thought that they could chuckle over those losing Romney voters who have now started secession petitions in all 50 states and the democratic counter-petitions advocating that anyone signing the secession petitions be deported from the USA (which is, one must admit, a great counter   )…

…We get a full-blown, high-level, national security and military sex-laden scandal:  The new James Bond movie “Skyfall” ! 

Of course, James Bond is a British hero, not an American one.  The USA was not about to be outdone by Her Majesty’s Secret Service or the British military intelligence service MI-5.

Nope.  It turned around and threw up a full-blown, high-government-level, CIA-spook laden, military generals infested, erotically titillating sex scandal involving the following:

David Petreaus, former US Army General and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ;

Paula Broadwell,  an attractive former US Army major and present day journalist who had sex and an affair with Petreaus;

Jill Kelley, a friend of Petreaus and attractive socialite with a twin sister, who does volunteer work for the US military and allegedly received emails from an allegedly jealous Paula Broadwell; and

John Allen, a four-star US Marine Corp general who is commander of all western forces in Afghanistan, and who allegedly “flirted” with Jill Kelly via email.

Piquing the public’s interest is the fact that all of these people are married, each with two daughters as it turns out.  Co-starring in this Oh-so-important-to-our-daily-lives dramatic epic is, of course, the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, tabloids everywhere, and the salivating public.  Seemingly absent from this story until recently was the White House and congress…except for GOP senator Eric Cantor, who allegedly knew about this well before the election…and never said a word about it.  Hmmmm…..

So take THAT, James Bond and the whole UK!!!!!

The list of stars above contains the entire basic storyline.  However, for the morbidly addicted, the  single second-to-second sordid details are HERE.

However, those details notwithstanding, the real issues are sex, evolution, science, humanity, physical anatomy, and the strange urge some have to imprint synthetic human ideas onto the natural physical world.  That’s a lot of words to say something very simple…and very true:

SEX IS THE ULTIMATE PHYSICAL PLEASURE AND FEELS GOOD DUE TO UNDENIABLE AND ULTIMATELY IRREPRESSIBLE HUMAN PHYSICAL EVOLUTION. 

For many thousands of years since the very beginning of quasi-civilization involving humans, there have been cultures, religions, dogmas, and even some medical efforts to suppress the natural biological human sexual drive.  It may well have started as an simple instinct similar to animal kingdom’s common reproductive instinct to prevent weaker group members from reproducing with the mates of the stronger members.  As humans evolved, so did their strategies for insuring their genes, and not those of some rival, would be passed along (though not in those terms, obviously     )

Then the concept of marriage solidified these practices, but to men’s benefit only, since they could have multiple wives.  Finally, polygamy was discarded in most of the world and the tipping point regarding artificial sexual repression was reached.

The fact that so many people have affairs, and so many others froth at the mouth over sexual scandals is testament to the built-up sexual repression coupled with the” frothers” inadequate prioritizing of what is critically important for survival.  The scandal-obsessed folks live vicariously through the “sexploitations” of others, while their learned belief system regarding the demonic evils of sex also demands punishment.  Oh, and they want to watch that punishment, too!

The GOP tried to inflict such punishment on Bill Clinton by impeaching him in 1998, for instance.  And of course, the religious right has a field day with these scandals.

There is a valid issue of betrayal of marriage vows, but that should only be between the people involved in the vow…and no one else.  When Bill Clinton got involved with Monica Lewinsky, the issue was personal and appropriately between Hillary Clinton and him, and not between him and the rest of the world.  But some people just had to make it their number one priority.  They prayed for hell and damnation to rain down on Bill Clinton.  And why?

Because they have no fulfilling life of their own, and therefore no one else should have one, either!

And so what if the USA drives off the fiscal cliff?  So what if the ice caps melt and Florida is gone?   Doesn’t matter.  The moralistic scandalizers demand their pound of flesh!  (pardon the pun! 

Well…f they want a pound of flesh, let them pay for HBO and watch after 10pm for their flesh.

Last week’s We, the PEOPLE!! predicted that president Obama would win the election with 290 electoral votes, and he won with 303 (or possibly even 332 electoral votes if Florida ever finishes counting their ballots).  Also predicted was that the democrats would gain  a few seats in congress.

Perhaps as significantly, some extremist republicans that have stuck their feet into their mouths regarding  rape, pregnancy, and women’s reproductive right are gone:  Todd Akin of Missouri, Joe Walsh of Illinois, and Richard Mourdock of Indiana.  Also possibly gone is Alan West of Florida, who likes to call his democratic colleagues in congress anti-American socialists. Gone, that is, if Florida ever finishes counting their ballots.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, the hatred and vitriol coming from some on the losing side have been burning up the social networks. For some reason, those folks seem to think that the world is ending, dictators around the world are all laughing, and all the unsubstantiated accusations against the president are actually absolutely true.  It might be necessary therapy for them, but it demonstrates a disgust and a lack of tolerance for the democratic process.

However, many of the more credible republican pundits are accepting the election results and are at least starting to talk seriously about the urgent need for the president and the republican-controlled house of representatives to work together to avoid the “fiscal cliff“, a.k.a. the Budget Control Act of 2011, that is looming on January 2nd, 2013 is not going to go away by itself.  If president Obama and speaker of the house John Boehner can’t reach a compromise to fix it, the ultimate damage to the economies of not only the USA, but Europe as well, will be enormous.  Predictions of another recession, a lowering of the USA’s already lowered credit rating, an significant increase in unemployment and other really bad events are being echoed by economists all across the political spectrum.  It would arguably be the worst self-inflicted harm to the country in history.

There is some reason for optimism:  After winning re-election last night, Obama stated in his victory speech that he would be calling Mitt Romney to talk about working together on ideas to help the economy.  Mitt Romney, in his concession speech last night, also called for bi-partisanship to solve these problems,  And today senate majority leader Harry Reid called for both sides to work together, that everything did not have to be a fight.

He’s absolutely right.  But it remains to be seen how the republican house will react.  John Boehner said that he wants both sides to work together to solve the problem, but he has also said repeatedly that he will not support increased taxes as part of a plan to avoid the fiscal cliff.

Over the next month and a half, the lame-duck congress will be in Washington.  Sometimes lame-duck sessions produce a flurry of legislation, and sometimes they don’t.  It’s a good bet that they will NOT produce a permanent solution to prevent the USA from driving off the mountainside.  Instead, they might pass an stop-gap extension of the Budget Control Act implementation date from January 2nd to sometime down the road, possibly as much as six months.

It is crystal clear that Americans are sick and tired of the gridlock that has gripped congress since the GOP regained control of the house of representatives following the 2010 elections.  The fact that Obama won re-election last night should be a wake-up call to to the GOP that people did not want to give them even more power than they already have.  Notably, some of the stanchest Tea Party extremists lost elections last night, and that speaks volumes.  When that is coupled with the fact that the GOP did not do well with women, Latinos and other minorities, it screams for the republican party to take a long hard look at itself.  It remains to be seen if the GOP can actually bring itself back towards the center after having become so extremist-right over the past four years.  A significant move toward compromise in congress would be a good start.

Even if the GOP wants to compromise, there are still obstacles.  Power brokers in the GOP such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have been sabotaging the efforts of moderate republicans for quite a while.  They tend to operate under the radar with massive amounts of money while making up their own rules and “facts”.  The amount of influence they wield will make it difficult for the moderates to reassert themselves.

Karl Rove actually wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal predicting a Romney victory.  Evidently, he hoped to bamboozle low-information voters to vote for a perceived winner.  He blew it.

But  We, the PEOPLE!! nailed it.        

For better or for worse, the absolutely brutal 2012 presidential election cycle will hopefully and mercifully end sometime next week, after the last polls close late on Tuesday, November 6th.  “Hopefully”…because it’s possible to have a repeat of the election count/recount/court battle that ensued in Florida in 2000 when neither GW Bush nor Al Gore could definitively claim the presidency until the Supreme Court settled the issue on December 12, 2000, almost 5 weeks after the November 7th election of that year.

We all know how THAT turned out, don’t we?

It could possibly happen again in one of the swing states, including Florida, where in 2000 the use of paper “butterfly ballots” was an issue.  This year most polling places are using electronic voting machines, but there is some suspicion about them as well.  And of course, with this election being so close in so many states, challenges to the initial result are probably inevitable.  But hopefully (there’s that pesky word again) we will get through the challenges quickly enough to not dramatically affect either the outcome or the timing of the final determination of the winner.

Most (but clearly not all) voters are aware that this election also involves electing congress because all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are in play every two years, as well as one third of US senators.  In this hyper-partisan environment, the party that wins/retains a majority in each house of congress will have a much greater impact on voters’ lives and future than the individual members that win elections.  In each house of congress, the majority party will control the schedule, the agenda, the committees and subcommittees.  This is incredibly significant considering the fiscal cliff of “sequestration” looming on January 2nd, 2013.

Thus, the election of congress is a lot more important than most people realize.  Even republican Speaker of the House John Boehner said that he doesn’t think sequestration can be fixed during the lame duck session of congress, which will occur after the election but before the newly elected members replace the losers and/retirees in January 2013.  That’s probably because the losers and retirees that are leaving in January have nothing more to lose if they defy their “no comprise” lunatic GOP leadership.

With this in mind, here are the predictions:

US House of Representatives:  The GOP will retain a majority of seats, and therefore control, but their present lopsided majority of 241 republicans to 194 democrats will be significantly reduced, perhaps by as many as 10, though more likely by five.  Five democratic pickups would change the numbers to 236 to 199, while 10 pickups would result in final numbers of 231 republicans to 204.  That would make it harder, but still not impossible, for the House to continue to stonewall ANY democratic proposals.

US Senate:  The democrats will retain control, although they will likely lose at least one seat of their slim majority to the GOP.  That doesn’t do much either way, since they still need 60 votes to break any GOP filibuster, which the GOP has used more over the past four years of the Obama administration than in all of previous US history combined before 2009.  The chances are that they will not be able to overcome the filibuster.

And finally…the presidency, itself:  Romney and his “lie, pivot, lie, deny, lie, change positions, etch-a sketch” campaign organization probably felt their stomachs hit the floor with a loud thud when the largest (in girth) Romney surrogate in existence, New Jersey’s republican governor Chris Christie, said on national TV yesterday for the whole world to hear that Obama was doing a great job during the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.  he called the president’s response to the disaster “outstanding”, and said that FEMA was doing  great job coordinating with state and local disaster relief efforts.

 See it HERE:  Christie praises Obama

This flies in the face of Romney’s statements about FEMA during a 2011 republican presidential debate, when he said he’d eliminate FEMA and send its role and its responsibilities down to the states, and and that he would even privatize it if he could.  Anyone paying attention would see this as yet another case of Romney not being able to get his foot out of his mouth fast enough.  The result?  The polls show Obama opening his lead in many swing states and even taking the lead in Florida away from Romney for the first time since early October, right after the first debate.  Of course, that’s right now, not next Tuesday. 

So, assuming Obama doesn’t screw up bad over the next six days, and Friday’s job report isn’t too bad, Obama, who needs 270 electoral votes to win re-election, is going to win 290 electoral votes.  And if the jobs report on Friday IS bad, Obama will still win with 271 elector votes.  It’s arithmetic, as Bill Clinton said.

That would make Mitt Romney the LOSER!!!! 

Actually, come to think of it, he already IS a loser.

Do you remember the 1978 hit song by Meatloaf, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”?

Meatloaf sang that two out of three ain’t bad;  He wants her, he needs her, but “there ain’t’ no way” he’s “ever gonna love her”.  Why does that ring a bell…?

President Obama and Mitt Romney have now completed their three debates, with Obama winning two out of three (which ain’t bad, don’cha know).  He might well have won the first one, too, if he had just remembered to bring his mind along with his body, but he left it elsewhere that night.  As a result, Romney took the first debate, giving his campaign quite a boost in the polls.  The final two debates should have similarly swung the remaining “undecideds” towards Obama, but they didn’t!

Thus, with 13 days left before election day in the USA and early voting already underway in many states, the remaining “undecideds” must be either

1.  not paying attention (which should disqualify them from voting),

2.  remaining undecided because they are SEEKING attention,

3.  have no idea how the US government really works (this alone should be disqualifying in its own right), or

4.  just have issues with basic decision-making.

This last category of people is easily recognized:  They can’t decide such simple things as which sock to put on first, the left one or the right one, or whether to put sugar in their coffee before or after the cream…or milk…or coffee-mate (they also can’t decide which).  The world is a confusing place for these people, and confused people shouldn’t be voting, either.  And why?  Because their confused vote might well elect the next president that the rest of us have to endure for 4 years, to say nothing of the congresspeople and senators who will decide our laws.  Remember Florida in 2000?

Besides electing the president of the USA for the next four years which includes the general agenda of the president’s political party (a fact lost on many), general elections are extremely critical in a polarized nation like the USA.  That’s because in each of the two houses of congress (the House of Representatives and the US Senate, for those who aren’t really sure), the party with the majority controls the agenda of proposed legislation that gets debated and voted on, as well as (pay attention…possible test question) the various committees in each house that mark up legislation before it any full vote.

These facts seem lost on many voters who are still “undecided”.  They only consider the person, and not what the person’s election might mean to the party’s political power to control budgets and laws for years to come.  These facts are just TMI (too much information) for many “undecideds” to deal with…just more data seemingly designed to add to the already overwhelming confusion and turmoil over whom to vote for…or, put another way, who to saddle the rest of us with for the next 2 or 4 or 6 years.

And if someone doesn’t know why it’s either 2 or 4 or 6 years, that person shouldn’t be voting, either.

Based upon not only the candidate but the candidate’s party affiliation, a primary criteria any voter should consider is the philosophical views and positions of the candidate’s party that will be brought to office, and the effect of that on the power of that party in government.  Unfortunately, most independent voters tend to ignore this completely, even if they can make an early decision.

Thus, if an voter is still undecided only 13 days out from the election, the basic political competency, intelligence, and knowledge of that person should be challenged.  After all, aren’t those the reasons that children aren’t allowed to vote…because they are, as a general rule, politically incompetent and ignorant and inexperienced in political realities?  What, then, is the difference between those children and undecided voters only 13 days left in an election that began almost two years ago?

Conversely, on the extreme opposite end of this issue are voters who have extremist views that they would imposed upon all of us if they could.  No, not the Taliban, but people like  republican Richard Mourdock of Indiana, running for the US senate and claiming that pregnancies resulting from rape are “God’s will” (no shit!) and whom Mitt Romney has endorsed (now pay attention), or republican congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois, seeking re-election, who believes a pregnant woman’s life is NEVER in danger, (no shit, again!), or even republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, seeking re-election, who thinks homosexuality is a disease that can be cured at her family’s clinic with prayer therapy. (yeah, she really does!!)

So: Pop Quiz time:  What’s the connection there?  Three congresspeople with extreme views, one with Romney’s endorsement:  the beginning of a political power caucus in congress that could ultimately be powerful enough to impose extremism upon others.  If they can convinced the undecided voter, that’s even more dangerous.

So if you’re still undecided, then PLEASE stay home and don’t vote.  We PROMISE we won’t tell on you.

Barack Obama became Rocky Balboa in “Rocky II” last night.  And his closing statement in the debate about Mitt Romney’s previous “47% of Americans” statement almost sounded like when Rocky yelled “Yo, ADRIANNNNNNE….I DID IT!!!!!!“ at the end of that movie (watch it HERE…skip to 3:30)

Like, WOW!!!!, dude. 

This was not the Barack Obama that snoozed through the first debate two weeks ago, wondering why he even had to be there.  This Obama was energized, assertive, in command of facts and data, folksy with the audience, and didn’t let Mitt Romney get away with most (though not all) of his fabrications and unworkable solutions.

Mitt Romney, for his part, continued to pivot his positions on issues such as contraception availability, his impossible, unworkable tax reduction plan, taking credit for accomplishments in Massachusetts in which he had little or no part, and demonstrating his total insensitivity or complete lack of understanding for women’s equality and issues.

Regarding women, he made it crystal clear that he thinks that women need special “flexibility” in the workplace because they need to get home in time to cook dinner.  Evidently, he is so wound up in his traditionalist roles of men and women that he is unaware that there are lots of men who also have the same need to get home to take care of kids and cook dinner as well.  This is not the 12th century anymore, but you might not have been able to make that distinction if you only had Romney’s statements about women at last night’s debate.

Romney also tried to push his traditionalist views on marriage and child-bearing, tying those views to gun violence in the USA.   He acknowledged, possibly after he realized that he had insulted single parents, that there are good single mothers and fathers out there, but the clear implication of his comments was that gun violence and children raised by single unmarried parents were connected.

He also made a big deal about how he had been a missionary (in France, mind you, not in darkest dangerous Africa), and how he had been a pastor in his church for years.  How being a missionary and religious pastor somehow qualifies someone to be the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on Earth was neither explained nor hinted at.

A couple of times during the debate Romney got into Obama’s face, interrupting the president in mid-sentence and challenging him to answer some question or other.  And when Obama began to answer the question, Romney interrupted him again and asked the same question.  It looked like a Romney effort to bully and intimidate the president.  To his credit, Obama didn’t allow himself to overreact to Romney’s rude behavior, and the tactic mostly backfired.

The president, for his part, was mostly strong and confident and continuously took the fight to Romney.  Obama seemed mostly relaxed, almost enjoying himself, with the exception that on a couple of isolated occasions he seemed to be groping for words.  However, compared to the first debate, Obama stood his ground, explaining facts and numbers, and addressing the audience in a personal and credible way.  Obama did himself a lot of good, particularly in light of his embarrassing performance during the first debate which Romney did not so much win as the president lost HUGE.   In the words of some of the pundits, Obama, at a minimum, stopped the bloodletting.

There also were two other extremely memorable moments in this debate, besides Obama’s closing statement where he absolutely SLAMMED Romney on his secretly recorded statement that 47% of Americans are a bunch of freeloading, government-dependent “victims”  (watch that HERE).

The first moment was when Romney attempted to convince the audience that he proactively supports equal pay for women because he recruited women in Massachusetts in 2004 from “Binders Full of Women“  (his words!).  As one might expect, this gaffe has gone absolutely viral in cyberspace.  Within two minutes of Romney inserting his foot in his mouth with this phrase, a web site was secured to display multiple humorous possibilities of what “binders full of women” might look like.  Check it out HERE.

The second, and one that promises to become a historical (and perhaps hysterical) moment in presidential debating, was when Romney demonstrated his utter ignorance of recent history regarding the assassination of 4 Americans in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.  You actually have to watch Romney’s own words to understand how badly he looked on this issue:

This exchange sucked all the air out of the GOP’s recent attacks on the Obama’s administration’s handling of this affair.  It demonstrates that the GOP will invent any issue and then promote their fabrications as fact.  But last night, it was laid bare for all to see.

Question:  How can there still be undecided voters after this?

Answer:  Because some people are chronically stupid.

With less than a month until the US presidential election,people seem to be focused on the forthcoming vice-presidential and 2 remaining presidential debates.

But something much more insidious than the political lies heard at debates is hanging on this election, which for reasons that defy logic has not gotten the public attention that it should.  The religious extremism of certain elected GOP officials has seemingly gone largely unnoticed and under-appreciated for its potentially damaging influence over the lives of everyone in this country.

For starters, many Tea Party members of the US government operate from a fundamentalist religious point of view, opposing abortion, contraception, gay rights, separation of THEIR church and state, equal pay and rights for women, evolution, global warming, stem cell research, respect for science, and other “anti-scripture” views.  And this force covertly works to undermine the social and scientific progress of the past 200 years in the USA.

Consider, for example, Todd Akins, the republican US congressman from Missouri, who is running for US senate against democrat incumbent Claire McCaskill.  Akin has made a whole litany of statements that reflect the extremism that seems to go hand-in-hand with contempt for science ans social freedoms:

*  “[Social Security and Medicare] are enslaving people and destroying people’s lives… Basically we fought a war on slavery already, we don’t want that anymore.” (1/10/12)

*   “[Doctors are] giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant.” (1/22/08)

*   “I think [food stamps are] destructive; putting people in chains to the welfare state is not compassionate and it needs to stop.” (6/11/12)

*   “One of the things that did distinguish me from some of my colleagues here was the fact that I would support a repeal of the 17th Amendment.” (6/11/12)

*   “Our freedom is seriously threatened right now… I hope we will fight the battle with ballots and not bullets, but the Second Amendment is our last ditch of defense.” (4/24/12)

*   “[Claire] had a confidence and was much more ladylike [in 2006], but in the debate on Friday she came out swinging.” (9/26/12)

*   “The federal government is destroying things right now. It’s paying women to have children out of wedlock. What you pay for, you get more of. That’s nuts.” (5/25/12)

*   “The bottom line is you’ve got a conservative House, you’ve got a bunch of socialists in the Senate, and you’ve got a commie President. That’s where we are.” (4/16/11)

*   “[Student loans are] the stage three cancer of socialism that is threatening our freedom.” (6/2/12)

*   “From what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” (8/19/12)

*  “I don’t believe in [global warming] at all, okay?… I just don’t think the evidence is good there from a scientific point of view.” (8/1/12)

Although many people have already seen these statements, Akin is still running even with McCaskill in Missouri, which says something very scary about half of the Missouri voters.

And there are other, somewhat less reported incidents that foretell a potentially ominous story for the USA should the GOP somehow regain full control of both the US congress and the presidency.  Remember Mitt Romney has no positions of his own on anything other than those of the people he’s facing and/or dealing with:

In Arkansas, republican state representative Ron Hubbard stated publicly that slavery was a “blessing in disguise” for the African Americans because without it, they would still be poor in Africa.  And another republican running for the Arkansas house of representatives, Charlie Fuqua, advocates deporting all Muslims for the USA, as well as the death penalty for unruly children!

And more:  Republican US congressman Paul Broun from Georgia has called evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory “lies from the pit of hell!“, adding that the Earth is only 9000 years old, was made in just 6 days, and that “God’s word is true.”  Unimaginably, he is running with NO opposition from a democrat in his district…which means he’s re-elected to Congress!!

Even more:  republican US senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma recently stated that global warming is the biggest hoax ever, because the scriptures (!!) says that Noah was told that after the flood that killed everyone on Earth except Noah’s immediate family, that God felt so bad that He said He’ll never do it again!!

WTF!!!!!!

And finally, these folks believe to a somewhat less violent extent (for now) what the Taliban believes when it comes to women:  They are not really equals, and their body parts must not be mentioned in public.  The very word “vagina” is abhorrent because vaginas are evil items that cast evil magical spells upon men.  Remember when Michigan state rep Lisa Brown was recently banned from the GOP-controlled Michigan state house for saying the word “vagina”?

People need to be afraid, They need to wake up, and they need to act NOW, because if the GOP sweeps this election, the motto in this country will be…

“America:  Welcome to the 12th Century“

p.s.  No wonder 20% of the people in this country claim total non-affiliation with any religion….

If you’re an Obama fan and you missed last night’s debate, you were one of the lucky ones.

Although the smart money still says Mitt Romney will still lose this year’s presidential election, note that if he does lose, it won’t be because of his performance standing up to president Obama last night.

Romney came to the debate prepared…ready to engage the president, cast doubt and aspersions against the president’s policies and record over the past three and a half years, and to demonstrate to the undecided voters that he has what it takes to take on the US president in public.

Obama, on the other hand, simply showed up, seemingly reluctantly.  He had none of the fire we have come to expect from him when he passionately speaks on the campaign trail.  He countered Romney’s steel-sworded attacks on his record and policies as if he was sparring back with a rubber sword in his hand.

What’s worse and absolutely unacceptable in a debate of this kind is that when Romney spouted his lies and misleading claims, Obama just let them stand without challenge.

When the debate was finally and mercifully over, the press was quickly unanimous, as were the multiple subsequent polls, that Romney had won the debate hands down.  He had been decisive and aggressive debating the president.  He had appeared cool, calm, and confident.  The president looked and sounded like he needed a nap.

Romney used an additional tactical tool  to win this debate:  Lies.

To be fair, Obama stretched the truth a few times as well, but Romney completely lied about his tax break plans, his Romney-care experience, his Obama-care replacement plans, and a multitude of other issues.  He said that 23 million people in the USA are unemployed, which is false.  He said that there was no tax deduction for moving a company overseas, when there is.  He said that Obamacare had caused healthcare premiums to rise by $2500 a year, which is not only untrue, but the last year’s rise is the lowest rise in many,many years.

For most of these lies, president Obama just let them slide.

However, The Daily Kos did a partial list of Romney’s debate lies that is worth repeating here.

• The Lie:  Romney claimed that “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.”                                     
• The Truth:  They’re not.
• The Lie:  Romney said that President Obama had “cut Medicare by $716 billion to pay for Obamacare.”
• The Truth:  Obama didn’t.
• The Lie:  Romney denied proposing a $5 trillion tax cut.
• The Truth:  He did.
• The Lie:  Romney said President Obama had “added almost as much to the federal debt as all the prior presidents combined.”
• The Truth:  Not even close.
• The Lie:  Romney resurrected “death panels.”
• The Truth:  That was called “one of the biggest whoppers of the night.”
• The Lie:  Romney stated that half the green energy companies given stimulus funds had failed.               
• The Truth:  Only if three out of nearly three dozen is half.

The real burning question has to be:  Why the F**K did Obama act in the lackluster way that he did, allowing Romney to climb all over him?  We can only speculate about the answer is.

Obama and his advisers are smart people.  They surely believed that Obama was ready for the debate after being prepped for it, just as Romney was prepped by his people for the same debate.

But Obama has a problem with marketing that we have all seen before.  He assumes that the American people are all intelligent folks that research the truth about legislatively passed programs, as well as the veracity of political claims by political candidates.  He first demonstrated this undeserved faith in people when he and the democrats passed health care reform in 2010, and then did an absolutely awful job of marketing the benefits of the health care reform law.  The republicans then turned it into an anthrax attack against the American people.

Thus, last night was like the aftermath of the 2010 passage of health care reform all over again.  The republicans, this time spearheaded by Mitt Romney and his entourage of lying thugs, climbed all over Obama in the debates, and Obama was caught flatfooted.  It’s a safe bet that no one was more shocked then Obama himself that he had sucked so bad during the debate with Mitt (The-Lying-Twit) Romney.

Today Obama and his advisers have got to be smarting over his horrible performance last night, while the republicans are celebrating Romney’s first-debate victory over Obama.  But there are still two more to go, plus a vice-presidential “for-entertainment-purposes only” debate that although fun to watch, will serve no useful purpose. 

And hopefully, Obama will be Rocky…he’ll come back ready to take on Romney regarding his credibility, his lies, his twisted reality, and his idiotic flip-flopping positions on EVERYTHING  over the past year.

Because if he doesn’t, the next four years are really gonna suck.  HUGE.

Next week the planet Earth is going to be treated to (or tortured by) the first of three presidential debates between democratic incumbent US president Barack Obama and his republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The primary topic of the debate is going to be the economy, which one might expect Romney, the multimillionaire ex-CEO of Bain Capital, a company that bought companies and then sold them or dismantled them at a profit, might actually have an advantage over the president.  After all, in 3 1/2 years in office, the president has not yet fully restored the prospering economy and budget surpluses that Bill Clinton left to GW Bush in 2001, and which Bush spent eight years utterly destroying.

Additionally, speaking of budget surpluses, consider that during the 200 presidential debates between GW Bush and Al Gore, Bush questioned the veracity of the budget surpluses of the last 4 years of Bill Clinton’s administration by stating that the administration had used  “fuzzy math” to “manufacture those surpluses.  It was a premeditated and preplanned effort with malice aforethought, designed to cast doubt about the surpluses in the minds of voters.  To some extent, causing that doubt was enough to get at least 635 people in Florida to vote for Bush who might otherwise have voted for Al Gore.  Gore won the national popular vote anyway, but still didn’t get to be president.

It’s creative fabricated propaganda.  A false statement is said loud enough and/or often enough, and people begin to believe it, even though there isn’t a shed of evidence to support it.  It’s also the methodology perfected and used extensively by Nazi Germany Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

While Bush dabbled in it from time to time during the 2000 campaign, his abuse of the truth was nothing compared to the 2012 Ryan/Romney campaign.  Their use of repeated fabrications and lies has risen to a new, extreme and abominable level for a free democracy.  It actually rivals the worst excesses of the the Nazi house of horrors.

There are literally countless examples of these lies that have hit the airwaves.  A more recent one is that Romney ads have falsely condemned president Obama for removing the work requirement from the federal Welfare to Work law.

The truth is that several republican governors have requested flexibility in implementing this law in their states, and the Obama administration responded by issuing waivers to those states so that they could in fact do so, providing that the states increase the number of people moving off welfare into jobs.

Politifact.com gave Romney a “Pants-on-Fire” score regarding that ad.

In addition to the outright fabrications, Romney has also demonstrated a fundamental lack of basic 4th grade scientific knowledge about airplanes and the atmosphere, specially that humans cannot breathe at 40,000 feet because there is not enough oxygen to sustain human life at that altitude.  This was revealed when Romney commented on the unscheduled emergency landing in Denver by a jet carrying his wife, Ann Romney.  The jet was headed to California from Omaha, Nebraska when smoke began to fill the passenger cabin.  Romney stated at a press conference that the windows couldn’t be opened to let fresh oxygen into the cabin because the windows in airline jets don’t open, that he didn’t know why that was, and that it was a real problem.  He added that there was enough oxygen for the pilots to land, though.  See it for yourself:

If Romney doesn’t even know basic science about air pressure, oxygen and our atmosphere, why would anyone believe anything he says about global warming and climate change, or any other technical issue for that matter?

To make matters worse, Romney reinforced his acts for fabrication on the campaign trail when he said two days ago that his ads are “spot on!”

All of this indicates two things:  First, that Romney thinks everyone is stupid and gullible, and ready to believe anything he says just because he says it, and second, that he is a lot more stupid about people and science than anyone knew.

As a result, Romney is losing this election because more and more people are realizing that someone who lies about everything can’t be trusted.  They are also realizing that someone who changes his positions of every issue important to people, depending upon which group of people he just happens to be talking to at the moment, can’t be trusted.

And finally, people are realizing that someone as ignorant as Romney when is comes to why people need spacesuits in space can’t be trusted with a trillion dollars of military might.

In a way, Romney may be causing the average voter to become more internet- and research-oriented.  He certainly has galvanized the fact-checkers into action.  Watching republicans running for office distance themselves from the Ryan-Romney train wreck speaks volumes as well.

And as a side perk….Watching train wrecks can be very entertaining….from a distance, of course. 

This week, We, the PEOPLE!! is taking a breather in preparation for the impending move back to paradise.  In the meantime, here’s a couple of phrases to think about when thinking of the GOP:

“If Lying Were Lethal, the GOP Would Suffer Sudden Mass Extinction.” *

and

“GOP:  Full-Frontal Fiscal Fraudulence”  **

which is the GOP’s rule#1 in their political playbook, and ultimately results in the concept of #1 above.  Think about it.

And feel free to turn these into bumper stickers.    

* This is a “We, the PEOPLE” original.

**Heard on the Bill Maher Show on (Friday 10pm on HBO) and just too good not to share. 

“Vote early and vote often.”

Most people have heard this popular slogan which had its origin in the 19th century.  The “vote early” portion encourages people to exercise their right to vote and extolls the benefit of going to the polls before the crowds and the lines form.  The “vote often” portion is supposed to be humorous in the present day…tongue in cheek…or is it?

Certainly, no one wants to see any person vote several times in any election.  It’s contrary to the basic democratic principle of one person, one vote.

Voter fraud can occur during voter registration, voting in person, or in absentee voting.  Voting rules are designed to prevent all of these.  If there is empirical evidence of a voting fraud problem, new federal and state laws might be required to fix that problem.

IF, that is, there actually IS a problem.

The real problem is that no such problem exists, at least as it pertains to voting in person.  In fact, the United States Department of Justice determined that between 2002 and 2007, 300,000,000 votes were cast in elections in the USA.  Federal prosecutors were only about to convict 86 voters out of all of those 300,000,000 votes of casting fraudulent votes, and most of those were by people who did not know they were ineligible to vote.

Voter ID laws tend to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, and particularly minorities, because in the USA the primary form of government-issued photo identification (ID) is a driver’s license, with passports constituting a distant second.  The poor, the elderly and many minority folks may not have a driver’s license because they either don’t now or never did own a car.   Or perhaps they haven’t driven in years and therefore haven’t renewed their driver’s license in years.

For some of the elderly, they may not even be able to renew a old driver’s license, perhaps from a different state from they president reside.  And old documentation such as previous licenses or even birth certificates may have been lost years ago, or perhaps were never even issued.

But none of this matters to the folks pushing these voter ID laws.  They know that the poor, the elderly, and most minorities such as African-Americans and Hispanics tend to vote heavily for democrats.

Thus, it’s really no surprise that since 2002, 9 states with republican governors and legislatures have passed Voter ID laws that require government-issued photo IDs to be presented before someone is allowed to vote.   Additionally, another 14 states require a non-photo ID to be presented before voting.

To date, voter ID laws have been passed and/or implemented in Alabama, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, New Mexico (later essentially repealed), Washington, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia (which later passed a law providing for the issuance of voter ID cards at no cost to registered voters who do not have a driver’s license or state-issued ID card), Missouri, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, and even Rhode Island (the only democratic state to do so, but then, Rhode Island isn’t known as ROGUE ISLAND for nothing).

In 2011, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas tightened their laws to require photo ID.   The US Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s law as placing an undue burden disproportionately on minority voters, and rejected

In 2012, the US Department of Justice rejected Texas’ law on the exact same grounds.  Additionally,  a Wisconsin state circuit court blocked the ID requirement provisions of Wisconsin’s Voter ID law, ruling the requirement in violation of the Wisconsin Constitution.  The Republican-led State Department of Justice is appealing the ruling.

Also in 2012, Pennsylvania passed a new voter ID law.

Most of these laws do not address absentee voting, and the reasons are obvious:  Hundreds of thousands of US service men and women are stationed outside of the USA.  They use absentee ballots, and as military troops, they vote heavily republican.  The GOP did not want to impact these voters (and any repeat voters) in any way.

It’s hard to argue that proof of identity isn’t important to establish during voting it.  But it must be done in a manner that is fair and convenient all citizens, including the poor, the elderly, the infirmed and the minorities.  One solution might be to make empirical voter IDs available for that purpose ONLY, make them easy to get with provisions for those who can’t easily get around.

Additionally, is there really any reason to require a voter ID from anyone over the age of 65, for example?  Does anyone really think the social security crowd is running around casting tons of votes in multiple locations every election day?

And finally, instead of issuing voter IDs on the basis of proven identity, why not issue them on the basis of voter competency?  Make voters take an exam, similar to the driver’s license exam.  They would have to pass a test that asks questions like:

“1.  The US government has three branches.  Name two other items with branches.”

The GOP is hip-boot deep in its convention propaganda in Tampa, Florida this week, basking in the media attention which has been only slightly diverted by Hurricane Isaac’s slamming into the Louisiana coast near New Orleans on the seventh anniversary to the day of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  The convention actually shortened its first business day from 8 hours to 2 minutes on Monday, August 27th because of the storm.  Evidently, they were worried that if they recessed at 10pm instead of 2:20pm like they did, the after-convention party-go’ers might get wet…or blown away.  

What kind of idiot plans a convention in Tampa, which sits on Florida’s west coast and the Gulf of Mexico, which is “Hurricane Central” at this time of year, anyway??  The answer is the GOP, which realized that Florida is the most “swing” state in the USA, and the convention center is in the most “swing” county in Florida, hoping to swing the undecideds their way.

Not every undecided voter is so stupid that he’s/she’s going to be swayed the GOP’s chosen location, but some may be.  And it’s those “some” that the GOP is hoping to sway their way with luster, lies, limericks, and money….gobs of money.

Mitt Romney is a wealthy businessman who has promised to reduce the tax and regulation burden for all wealthy businessmen…people who have more money stashed in secret offshore accounts than most middle class people make in a lifetime.  They can afford to donate millions of dollars…in fact HUNDREDS of millions of dollars…to the candidates that promise to help them make even MORE millions of dollars.

These megalo-wealthy folks can do that in two ways.  The first way is through donations to individual candidates up to $2500 per person in a calendar year, as regulated by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) .  There are also other limits depending upon who is donating and who is receiving, but in any combination, the contribution cannot exceed $117,000, or $46,200 to all candidates plus $70,800 to all political action committees (PACs} and/or parties combined.

Although the monetary limits seem a bit high to most middle-class voters, these regulations were designed to guard against lopsided contributions from a conglomeration of special interests buying off an election.  These regulations worked reasonably well until a conservative organization named Citizens United challenged the law.  In 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Citizen United’s favor that corporations and unions had a first amendment right to freedom of speech and that limiting their abilities to make political contributions was a first amendment violation.

That decision gave rise to super-secret  Super PACS, which may engage in unlimited political spending independently of the actual candidate campaigns. .They can also raise funds from corporations, unions and other groups, and from individuals, without legal limits.  They need not report their contributors, and can spend the unlimited amount of money received in ads and messages designed to assassinate the character, reputation and political career of any political candidate they chose.

Though they are to be independent of candidate campaigns, it is clear that anyone can talk to anyone about anything, as long as it’s not an official “joint meeting”.  (nod, nod, wink, wink).

The super-duper-wealthy can now buy an election free from annoying government oversight.  And man, are they buying.  They are making the FEC maximum reportable contributions to the Romney campaign, which has out-raised the grassroots contributions of the Obama campaign for three months in a row.  And now they are also able to donate as much as they want to the conservative anti-Obama super-pacs, remaining completely anonymous (and unaccountable) as they do.

To be sure, their are pro-Obama super-pacs as well, but they don’t attract these wealthiest 1% of political contributors.  Instead, middle-class grass-roots voters and union contribute to them, and here is no way they can match the extreme wealth and contributions of the 1%.

The conservative multi-billionaire Koch brothers are worth approximately USD $50 billion.  They’re reportedly going to contribute up to USD $100 million to help Romney and the republicans win in November.  Without the Citizens United decision, they would not be able to contribute more than USD $117, 000…at least legally.

To make matters even more unsavory, political dirt-crawlers like Carl Rove are organizing and running those conservative super-pacs.  These people are known for their use of dirty tricks and smear campaigns.  So they’ll be creating and airing dirt-wrapped political ads to win their way.  Truth has no role to play here.

If the American voter was bright enough and/or diligent enough to do his or her own research into what is and isn’t true, and if they took the time to fact-check, these super-pacs would lose their influence.  But many people just listen to the voice yelling the loudest, longest, and most often.  Scary.

Remember when “He with the most votes wins”?  It’s been warped by Citizens United to

“He who buys the most TV ads wins”.

VERY scary.

If you’re reading this, you are probably reasonably well-informed on current events, which means you probably know all about republican US congressman from Missouri, Todd Akin.  He’s the staunch ultra-right-wingnut who religiously opposes any abortion for any reason, including in cases of rape, incest, of even to save the mother’s life.

As luck would have it, last Saturday he told a TV station in St. Louis, Missouri that  a woman who is the victim of a “legitimate rape” (evidently as opposed to an “Illegitimate rape”, whatever that it) mostly likely could not get pregnant because she has an internal system that shuts down during a “legitimate rape”.

What you may not know is that Akin is on the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology!!

Yep.  This evangelical is a graduate from the Covenant Theological Seminary.   He evidently learned about the female reproductive science during soulful prayer sessions at college.  That speaks volumes about the republican vetting process for congressional committee memberships, even under the theoretically watchful eye of republican Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio.

By Sunday opposition to Akin across the political landscape was almost unanimous.  Republicans broke their normally closed protective “wagon train” circle to criticize Akin and distance themselves from him, even calling for him to drop our to the race for US senate against democratic incumbent senator Claire McCaskill.  Up until this incident, Akin was leading McCaskill in the polls. But now even the Ryan-Romney team came out against Akin, albeit first issuing a wishy-washy statement about how they would support abortion in the case of rape, but later more forcefully calling for Akin to withdraw from the senate race.

Interestingly, Paul Ryan, Romney’s pick for vice-president, is a staunch anti-choice guy as well.  Earlier this year he actually co-sponsored a bill with Akin to redefine rape as only occurring if violence was also part of the action, i.e. “forcible rape”.  This would limit a woman’s ability to have an abortion if she was raped without violence.  Ryan was later forced to modify that language somewhat, but not before showing his true colors on the issue of women’s reproductive rights, i.e., that they shouldn’t exist.

Democrats were almost unanimous in their call for Akin to withdraw from the Missouri senate race, with one very notable exception:  Claire McCaskill herself, whom, after Akin began his now endless apologetic backtracking Sunday, issued a statement acknowledging that Akin had apologized and it was time to move on.  Of course, she had to be aware that Akin’s chances of unseating her have dropped to somewhere between microscopic and non-existent.  Even republicans picked up on that fact, repeating their calls for Akin to step out of the senate race.

But true to the unshakable faith that provides total belief that the Earth is flat and global warming is a myth, Akin didn’t budge in the face of all those demands.  Instead, he said that his faith in the voters’ ability to see beyond his “small” misstatement on “legitimate rape”is keeping him in the race, and he will not withdraw, which defied the latest call from even the Ryan-Romney conglomerate.   Akin had until the end of last Tuesday to withdraw without penalty;  now any attempt to withdraw will require a court order, and he will most likely be ordered to pay the state of Missouri to have new ballots printed up.

This is just another example of unshakable, unprovable, emotionally-charged fact-rejecting faith (with a little ego added in) trumping math, science, engineering and technology.

Oh, wait.  He’s on the US House Science, Space and Technology Committee, so maybe he’s right and all those round-Earth fools are wrong.

In fairness, Akin has acceded to one GOP demand:  he will not attend the GOP convention in Tampa, Florida next week.  Considering that Florida is a gun-totting state, the GOP convention planners probably fear a shootout led by women in Annie Oakley outfits if Akin shows up.

Of course, this bizarre incident is just more proof that the republican party is being highjacked by people like Akin who espouse all kinds of weird policies based upon fundamental religious principles.  In fact, a number of right-wing organizations such as the Family Research Council have expressed total support for Akin.  These ultra-extreme-religious-right-wing organizations oppose abortion, sex outside of marriage, gay rights in any form, and they believe in “traditional roles” for people, particularly women. They have a lot in common with other fundamentalist belief systems that demand total dedication and unquestioning loyalty from their followers, much like the Taliban does.  That’s dangerous.

But selecting someone who believes that rape shuts down a woman’s reproductive system to serve on the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology is also dangerous…and incredibly STUPID!!!

And who’s responsible for that kind of stupidity?

REPUBLICANS!!!

(you know…the same folks that brought you the recession?)            

Late last week Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan to be his vice-presidential running mate in the 2012 general elections.  Ryan is serving his seventh term as a conservative republican congressman from Wisconsin.

Since January 2011 when the republicans took over control of the US House of Representatives, Ryan has served as chairman of the House budget committee.  As such, he has the authority to propose the yearly budget to run the US government.   He did exactly that, in what is now infamously known as the 2011 Ryan Budget Plan.  Although he claimed that his plan would reduce the US budget deficit by US$6 trillion over a decade, factcheck,org disputed that, claiming that Ryan’s plan would actually increase the budget deficit.  No matter, though, because his plan made Ryan the fiscal darling of the Tea Party movement in the USA.

Mitt Romney became the presumptive GOP presidential nominee following a bruising primary season.  Yet, while the other GOP primary candidates were still in the running, Romney was never able to garner more than 25% of the vote in multiple primaries, even though he won those primaries anyway due to the large number of competitors.  It wasn’t until the last primaries when all but two or three candidates had dropped out of the race that Romney was able to climb beyond that 1/4 mark.  And even after Romney’s last competitor had “suspended” his campaign, the tea party and their ultra-extreme-right-wing supporters still had great difficulty wrapping themselves around Romney’s candidacy.  After all, as governor of Massachusetts, Romney had embraced every liberal political position that conservatives hated.

Romney mysteriously appeared to have had an “epiphany” coincidentally at the time that he began his run for the GOP presidential nomination:  Every liberal position he held as governor magically reversed itself.  Suddenly, he only held ultra-conservative views.  Yet, the Tea Party remained largely lukewarm to Romney’s candidacy.  They obviously would NEVER vote for Obama, but their lack of enthusiasm for Romney might just make them stay home in November.

This is the math that his campaign staff charged with vetting and selecting a vice-presidential candidate did, resulting in Ryan being anointed the “one”.

The reasons are clear:  Ryan, as the sweetheart of the ultra-socially-conservative and the fiscally selfish, would galvanize support in the GOP’s conservative base.  Not only was he incredibly austere in believing that the federal government serves little or no purpose outside of national military defense and offense (he’s voted for war at every opportunity), but he is also a young, attractive, energetic religious family-oriented individual, much as Sarah Palin, the GOP vice-presidential nominee of 2008, is.  And Ryan is more intelligent and articulate than Palin could ever hope to be.  As such, he can spin every conservative view he has much more effectively and eloquently.  Put another way, he can easily outsell Palin at the snake oil booth, a plus in the math used to select him.

Alternatively, Ryan’s selection moved the entire Romney/Ryan ticket way over toward the extreme right.  While the party base (which was never going to vote for Obama anyway) LOVES it, that swing to the right is scaring some undecided independents and other moderates.  After all, Ryan, in his now infamous “2011 Ryan Budget Plan” proposed to privatize both Social Security and Medicare, two extremely popular federal social safety net programs.  Imagine the disaster if social security had already been privatized when the 2007 recession hit:  it would have been decimated!

And even in his modified 2012 budget plan, Ryan still sees these and other entitlement programs as fair game for privatization, which is nothing more than a way to provide private industry with profit-making opportunities.  In both 2011 and 2012 he proposes to convert Medicare into a “voucher” program which seniors would use to help pay for private-industry-for-profit health insurance.  And we all know how well the for-profit private health insurance companies work to provide complete and affordable medical care to all citizens, don’t we?

And finally, he embraces tax cuts for the wealthy, but those cuts would have to be paid for by the middle class.  Romney has a very similar plan as well.

Obama’s campaign has been uncharacteristically (but wisely) quiet since Ryan’s selection as Romney’s running mate.  It will continue to do so until the end of the GOP convention in Tampa on August 30th.  It’s pointless for the dems to blow bubbles into the wind right now. Instead, president Obama is doing the next best thing:  he’s on the campaign trail in battleground states previewing the coming political ad onslaught coming our way in the Fall.

Once the Tea Party-dominated GOP exposes all its extremist conservative positions during their convention, watch the democrats turn on the heat and come out swinging.  And when they do start, expect to see an ad that exposes every liberal position ever supported by Romney…

…and that Paul Ryan was voted “Biggestbrown-noser” when he was in high school!

No kidding!   

For those old enough to remember, five obscure member’s of republican US president Richard Nixon‘s re-election campaign broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC on the night of June 17th, 1972, with the intent of stealing democratic campaign planning documents.  They were caught in the act and arrested.

What followed over the next two years was a relentless investigation which became universally known as Watergate.  While the Watergate investigation was unfolding, Nixon repeatedly denied any knowledge of, or connection with the issue on any level.  But then one day it was revealed that Nixon had previously installed a secret recording device in the White House that taped every conversation where business was conducted by the president.

Investigators made demand for those tapes.  But Nixon continuously refused to provide any tapes other than a small number which revealed nothing, citing executive privilege. Ultimately, the case went before the US Supreme Court, where Nixon lost that battle in an 8-0 decision.

The moment that decision was made public,the handwriting was on the wall.  Nixon was all done.  Facing an impeachment trial in the US senate, he chose instead to resign the US presidency on August 9, 1974, the only US president ever to do so.  he tapes revealed not that he had any known role in the burglary itself, but that he had participated in the resulting cover-up of the link between the burglars and the republican Committee to Re-elect the President” (CREEP).  That was the organization responsible for Nixon’s re-election campaign.   Additionally, 43 members of Nixon’s administration were convicted and served time in prison for their roles in the Watergate scandal.

No wonder Nixon didn’t want the tapes released.  Without the conclusive evidence on those tapes, it might not have been possible to prove conclusively that Nixon was lying repeatedly about the link between him and the cover-up, and the Nixon presidency might have survived.   After all, he had just won a landslide re-election victory and he was riding a wave of misguided popularity, although it was starting to drop in the increasingly intensity of Watergate investigation.  He had even gone on national television to proclaim to the nation that “I am not a crook!” which you can see for yourself:

Fast forward 40 years and 7 weeks after the Watergate break-in, and 38 years almost to the day since Nixon resigned,

August 2012:

Republican Mitt Romney is trying to unseat first-term president Barack Obama.  Romney’s main claim to fame is his years as the CEO of Bain Capital, a company that among other business practices often bought distressed companies, broke them up into pieces and then sold the pieces off for a profit.   In doing so, countless American jobs were either lost as their jobs were either eliminated outright or outsourced to foreign countries.  But big money was made by the company’s shareholders as well as by Romney himself.

Big money buys a lot of tax avoidance lawyers and specialists for the very rich so they can pay as little taxes as possible.  Part of that is done by “sheltering” money, such as, for example, sending it offshore.

Romney thinks the rich pay too much in taxes, even with all those tax experts diverting all that money into tax shelters, so he has a plan to reduce marginal tax rates for the rich.  He also claims that his plan will not reduce overall tax revenue for the USA, but he doesn’t explain how reducing taxes on the rich isn’t going to result in a tax revenue shortfall.  However,  the non-partisan Tax Policy Center figured it out:  the tax revenue deficit can only be made up by increasing taxes on the middle class.

Clearly, Romney believes the rich, who generally pay a lower tax rate now than the middle class does anyway, needs even MORE tax breaks.  But wait…there’s MORE:

According to a reliable source providing data to US senate majority leader Harry Reid, (democrat from Nevada), Mitt Romney did not pay ANY taxes for a period of at least 10 years, even though he admits to a huge income for every year of his adult life!

Predictably, Romney and the GOP are screaming that this is totally false.  But unlike his dad, George Romney, who as a GOP presidential candidate in 1968 released 12 years of his most recent tax returns, his son Mitt Romney has only released one year (2010) with a claim that he will release his 2011 tax return once it is completed (why his tax firm needs so much extra preparation time is anyone guess).  Instead, like Nixon with the Watergate tapes,Romney has refused to release any more tax returns, even though the claim of his no-taxes-paid-for-ten-years is starting to hurt his credibility and campaign.

It begs the obvious question, which is:

Why won’t he release them and put the claim to rest?  Is he hiding something?

Well..read this and then figure it out:

Why didn’t Nixon release the Watergate tapes until he was forced by the Supreme Court?  Was he hiding something?

Yep.  Romney-gate or Tax-gate.  Remember you heard them here first. 

Informed republican leadership in the GOP must be thanking their lucky stars (or whatever deity they believe in) that Mitt Romney is back on USA soil.  After all, the USA is where they at least know what to expect to flow out of Romney’s mouth on domestic issues…since he has already held every possible position on every domestic issue at one time or another.

They are surely happy that his world tour of last week, which was intended to demonstrate that Romney is ready to be commander-in-chief as well as US-ambassador-to-the-world-in chief, is mercifully over.  Unfortunately for the GOP and the trip planners, Romney’s trip to England, Israel and Poland didn’t showcase him as anywhere near ready to take over the presidency on January 20th, 2013.  Instead, it harkened back to the horribly misguided selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s pick for vice-presidential nominee in 2008, a selection that even former USA vice-president “Tricky Dick” Cheney has called a “mistake” because she was not ready to become president if the call came.

Romney took this trip to at least try to close the gap between his and president Obama’s standing in the polls on foreign policy, which showed him trailing the president by 52% to 40%, a 12 point spread.  But after the gaffs and misstatements Romney made in England and Israel, and the pissy way a Romney’s press secretary handled a reporter in Poland, it is VERY unlikely that Romney scored any brownie points in “world affairs”, unless one is referring to a “fun” relationship two people in different countries.  No, wait.  He probably isn’t real smart on that subject, either. 

Romney’s “not-so-excellent-foreign-adventure” started going south when he made statements regarding London’s lack of preparedness for the Olympic Games which began last week.  That alone had the London newspapers dubbing Romney “Mitt the Twit”.  Regardless of how his campaign people tried to spin it, the first day of Romney’s tour set the unfortunate tone for the rest of his trip.

During the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, Romney and his wife Ann got to watch an elaborate tribute to the U.K.’s National Health Service, a socialized universal health care system that the Brit’s LOVE!!  The irony of this was not lost on the British press any more than it was lost on the US press.  Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts signed “Romneycare” into law, thinking it was good, only later found out that the GOP thinks it’s really bad.  So he had to run against his own plan, which served as the model for “Obamacare“, which the GOP hates even more.  Then he had to sit through a ceremonial salute to England’s “Romney-Care/Obama-care” on steroids, namely the National Health Service.  Poor Mitt the twit.  He was “shaken…but not stirred”.

While on the flight to Israel after departing the UK, one might have thought that Romney’s on-board campaign directors would have told him to cool it with insulting indigenous people in a foreign land, and also to make it clear that universal health care won’t work in the USA.  But Mitt would have none of that.  Once in Israel he made the statement that the Israelis’ very socialized universal health care system was clearly working better than health care in the USA since the Israelis spend only 10% of their gross domestic product on health care, while the USA (without universal healthcare) spends 18%!  And the Israelis live longer than Americans!!  So Romney went well beyond watching a tribute to universal healthcare as he did in London, to actually praise it in Israel!!

You just can’t make this stuff up.    And it’s a sure bet this is going to come up in the final fall campaign push to the November elections.

He also managed to severely insult the Palestinians while pandering to a group of very rich and extreme-right-wing-Israelis and Americans at a fundraiser hosted by none other than the ultra-conservative anti-Obama casino & hotel magnate gazillionaire Sheldon Adelson.  By doing so, he actually weakened the USA’s influence and flexibility to help broker a real and sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Not exactly what one might want in a diplomat-in-chief….

Then on to Poland, where Romney played it safe and didn’t answer any questions from the press.  In fact, his campaign’s traveling press secretary, Rick Gorka, told an American reporter asking Romney a question (which he didn’t answer) to “Kiss my ass!”.  Yep.  you can watch it HERE!

Many conservatives probably think that foreign policy isn’t very important, just like GW Bush did.  But thankfully, the latest polling shows president Obama pulling ahead of Romney in the most important swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida.   So much for the Palin/Romney fan club.

And as former president Bill Clinton and vice-president Joe Biden have recently stated, Mitt (the twit) Romney as president would be like having George W. bush…

...ON STEROIDS!!!!

THAT’S a scary thought.

On July 26, 2007, the first “We the PEOPLE!!” blog was written and published at this web site (you can view it HERE).  GW Bush had been president for 6 1/2 years, the USA was fighting two unfunded wars that seemed endless money pits, VP Dick Cheney was still claiming that Iraq still had hidden weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)  and Osama bin Laden was still running around the countryside with impunity.

Five years later, it’s interesting to see the changes.  Not only were no WMDs ever found in Iraq (the stated reason for our invasion of that country), but the Iraq war and the USA’s presence in that country both ended.  The war in Afghanistan is still going on, but the USA and its NATO allies are drawing down their involvement, and there is actually an end date (2014) for the complete withdrawal of all NATO troops.  Osama bin Laden is dead, taken out by elite US forces.  Bush and his entourage are gone, although the republicans have regained the control of the US House of Representatives which they lost in 2008.  And sadly, their minority standing in the senate is still large enough to block anything the democrats try to do.  Remember that from 2002 to 2006 the GOP controlled both houses of congress and did whatever they wanted.

Since the first “We, the PEOPLE!!” blog, while much is better, some things are still very bad.  An example is the economy that the GOP drove into the ground during that 2002-2006 period that they controlled everything.  That’s the same time frame that saw massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the initiation of yet another totally unfunded war half way around the world from the USA, and the passing of a drug prescription plan for seniors (a good thing, by the way) that was also completely unfunded (a bad thing).  Deregulation of the financial industry was another of their accomplishments.  And when all of this was mixed together, the bottom fell out of the housing market, and then the financial markets, precipitating the worst recess since the great depression of the 1930′s.

5 years after that first blog the USA in deep into a political season which will culminate in a general election on November 6th, 2012.  President Obama, who inherited a massive pile of dung from the previous administration, and who has been blocked at every turn by the republicans in Congress, is running for his political life against a very wealthy multimillionaire who has perfected the art of flip-flopping to win at any cost.  Before Mitt Romney became the darling heir-apparent of the GOP presidential nomination, he had to swing WAY to the extreme right to knock out his other GOP opponents during the primary season.  Oone of those opponents is an extreme right-winger who hysterically fancied herself as US president: Michele Bachmann, republican congresswomen from Minnesota.

Michele two greatest assets are her physical attractiveness and her (and her husband’s) money.  Those two assets have earned her two terms as US congresswoman from Minnesota, and she is now running for a third term.  But a year ago she ran for the US presidency, and that’s when much of the country, and even the world, got to know who she really is.

During the GOP presidential primary season, Michele perfected the art of inserting her shapely foot into her shapely mouth by saying the most outrageous things in a way that told the listener that she probably also believes in the tooth fairy.  For example, she said that if she was elected president, she would lower gasoline prices in the USA, which at the time were more than USD $3.50 a gallon and rapidly headed for $4 a gallon, to $2 a gallon, as if a president had any control over the oil companies, refineries, and commodity speculators.  She claimed repeatedly that president Obama was born outside the USA, and she emphatically stated that the founders of the US constitution (1787) ended slavery in the USA (1865).  For a more complete list of her “rantings and beliefs of a 5-year-old intellect”, click HERE.

She didn’t even come close to winning the nomination.  And when the primaries were over, it seemed that Michele sort of faded background into the woodwork from whence she came.  Until this week, that is, when she opened her mouth again, this time on the Glenn Beck Show, and accused Muslim-Americans in the US government of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.  Thus, with one fell swoop, she not only commited an act of multiple slander against government officials with exemplary service the USA, but once against demonstrated that the ultra-extreme-radical-religious-right lunatics within humanity will believe anything, even if they make the stuff up themselves… Just like the 5 year old with her imaginary teddy-bear-shaped friend.

So to Michele Backmann’s intellect, as well as to this blog (which has NO connection whatsoever to Michele Bachmann)….

HAPPY 5th BIRTHDAY!!!!

…the annual trek from paradise (Daytona Beach, Florida) to the land of frozen winters, car-swallowing potholes, pissed-off state workers, incredibly high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, and a state government that almost makes the US congress look adequate.  Almost, though not quite.  It would be a benefit to its residents if Massachusetts would invade and turn into one of its counties.  Only trouble with that is that Massachusetts doesn’t want it. 

Of course, this all refers to the smallest state in the USA, known for the incredible wealth of the “haves” and “have more’s” who frolic in Newport on their mega-million dollar yachts or in their sea-side mansions.  You know…Little Rhody, as it’s called (by practically no one), or as some refer to it, “Rogue Island”or “Wrong Island”.

RI might in fact be the last of the 50 states to still not list its legal forms on line.  But enough of that for now…

Next week is the 5th anniversary of “We, the PEOPLE!!  and the blog will be back in full force…with certain “party favors”.

Remember the stupid story about Barack Obama having a stolen social security number?  It was incredibly impossible. No one should have believed such a moronic thing.  But people who are too stupid, too lazy or too learning-impaired to understand the most basic lessons of logic and common sense believed it and circulated it around the internet.  It inspired the June 13th, 2012  We, the PEOPLE!! article entitled “Political Hoaxes and the Idiots That Believe Them” which you can read HERE.  And it included all the embedded links to references and sources that anyone could click to see for themselves.  Credibility, after all, is important to thinking people.

Not one month later, ANOTHER malicious attack email being circulated by these same folks was sent to me.  It reads:

“My right wing friends   spreading fear, as always…

Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 4:32 PM
Subject: Fwd: DO YOU HAVE A GUN IN THE HOUSE? KNOW HOW TO ANSWER.

“When I had my gangrene gallbladder taken out and spent 10 days in the hospital for what should have been an overnight stay the insurance company kicked me out. I had home nurse visits for two weeks and was asked if I had guns in the house. I respond that if I did I would not tell them. So the below has some merit.

“FYI, I am passing this along… there are comments from two other people I have also been asked if we keep guns in the house. The nurse just kinda slipped it in along with all the other regular questions. I told her I refused to answer because it was against the law to ask.

 Everyone, whether you have guns or not, should give a neutral answer so they have no idea who does and who doesn’t. My doctor asked me if I had guns in my house and also if any were loaded. I, of course, answered yes to both questions. Then he asked why I kept a loaded gun close to my bed. I answered that my son, who is a certified gun instructor and also works for Homeland Security, advised me that an unloaded, locked up gun is no protection against criminal attack.

The Government now requires these questions be asked of people on Medicare, and probably everyone else.

 Just passing this along for your information: I had to visit a doctor other than my regular doctor when my doctor was on vacation.. One of the questions on the form I had to fill out was: Do you have any guns in your house?? My answer was None of your damn business!!

So it is out there! It is either an insurance issue or government intervention. Either way, it is out there and the second the government gets into your medical records (as they want to under Obamacare) it will become a major issue and will ultimately result in lock and load!!

Please pass this on to all the other retired guys and gun owners… Thanks. 

From a Vietnam Vet and retired Police Officer: I had a doctors appointment at the local VA clinic yesterday and found out something very interesting that I would like to pass along. While going through triage before seeing the doctor, I was asked at the end of the exam, three questions: 1. Did I feel stressed? 2. Did I feel threatened? 3. Did I feel like doing harm to someone?

 The nurse then informed me that if I had answered yes to any of the questions I would have lost my concealed carry permit as it would have gone into my medical records and the VA would have reported it to Homeland Security.

Looks like they are going after the vets first. Other gun people like retired law enforcement will probably be next. Then when they go after the civilians, what argument will they have? Be forewarned and be aware. The Obama administration has gone on record as considering veterans and gun owners potential terrorists. Whether you are a gun owner, veteran or not, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED !

 ”If you know veterans and gun owners, please pass this on to them. Be very cautious about what you say and to whom.

 ”They are coming for us, so unless you’re an ostrich, do not stick your head in the sand……….”

Here’s the response sent:

“This is utter BULLSHIT.  It was generated by folks in the NRA to bolster the attacks against the US attorney general Eric Holder so that they could generate a non-existent issue to galvanize gun owners and conservatives to vote, and to swing independents.

“It is no different from the rumors they spread during the last election in 2008, that Obama would come after guns and ammo if elected.  Their efforts only succeeded in causing a run on ammo in gun stores that resulted in a shortage of ammo that took six months to rectify.

“For some reason that defies explanation, many people will believe the unbelievable and unprovable and, most importantly, illogical…

“Here’s just some of what’s wrong with the message from this lunatic woman:

“1. “When I had my gangrene gallbladder taken out and spent 10 days in the hospital for what should have been an overnight stay the insurance company kicked me out”. Someone with a gangrene gall bladder probably is very close to death, and removal of such a thing would require a minimum of 10 days just to stabilize infection. Why would she claim it was supposed to be only an overnight stay?  Furthermore, insurance companies don’t kick people out of hospitals. They might not pay past a point but that would be determined on a case by case basis by the doctor’s reports and hospital reports.

“2.  She says “The Government now requires these questions be asked of people on Medicare, and probably everyone else.” Wait a minute! She earlier said she was dealing with an insurance company. Since Medicare provides for all hospitalization coverage, how did her “insurance company” kick her out?

“3.  Re: #2 above, the government, which presumably is the executive branch headed by Obama, does not have the authority to make laws. Congress passes laws and the president signs them or vetoes them. A federal government agency can make regulations, but first they must publish a Notice of Proposed Rule-making in the Federal Register for a minimum of 60 days and invite comments. The NRA would have jumped all over that, and done so VERY publicly.

“4.  In not ONE CASE is there a name or a web address to verify a single allegation.  It’s just a bunch of premeditated bullshit, including the reference to Obamacare (“wants to get into your medical records”). Obamacare has NO provision to roll back the HIPAA laws regarding medical privacy protection, which you can read HERE.

“And FINALLY!!!… snopes.com, which investigates these rumors, has declared this FALSE!!!!  You can check it out for yourself HERE, but for your idiot right wingnut conservative friends, if you print this out, here’s the actual web site: http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/medicare.asp

“Hope this settles the issue. I’m interested to hear the reaction you get….And PLEASE feel free to tell them to contact me if they want to fight against truth and logic.  ”

Every time these idiots spout their garbage and this blog becomes aware of it, these folks are going to be embarrassed with those nasty  and stubborn little things called facts.  And everyone on the entire email header of the message is going to see how dumb all the re-emailers are.

It should be a lot of fun. 

This is utter BULLSHIT.  it was generated by folks in the NRA to bolster the attacks on the US attorney general Eric Holder so that they could generate a non-existent issue to galvanize gun owners and conservative to vote and to swing independents.

It is no different from the rumors they spread during the last election in 2008, that Obama would come after guns and ammo if elected.  Their effort only succeeded in causing a run run on ammo in gun stores that took six months to rectify.

For some reason that defies explanation, many people will believe the unbelievable and unprovable and, most importantly, illogical  I recently wrote a blog about that entitled “Political Hoaxes and the Idiots That Believe them”, which you can read HERE.  This is exactly the same bullshit.

Here’s just some of what’s wrong with the message from this lunatic woman:

1.  “When I had my gangrene gallbladder taken out and spent 10 days in the hospital for what should have been an overnight stay the insurance company kicked me out”.  Someone with a gangrene gall bladder probably is very close to death, and removal of such a thing would require a minimum of 10 days just to stablize infection.  Why would she claim it was supposed to be only an overnight stay?  Furthermore, insurance companies don’t kick people out of hospitals.  They might not pay past a point but that would be determined on a case by case basis by the doctor’s reports and hospital reports.

2.  She says “The Government now requires these questions be asked of people on Medicare, and probably everyone else.”  Wait a minute!  She ear;ier said she was dealing with an insurance company.  Since Medicare provides for all hospitalization coverage, how did her “insurance company” kick her out?

3.  Re: #2 above, the government, which presumably is the executive branch headed by Obama, does not the authority to make laws.  Congress passes laws and the president signs them or vetoes them.  A federal government agency can make regulations, but first they must publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register for a minimum of 60 days and invite comments.  The NRA would have jumped all over that, and done so VERY publicly.

4.  In not ONE CASE is there a name or a web address to verify a single allegation.  it s just a bunch of premeditated bullshit, including the reference to Obamacare (wants to get into your medical records).  Obamacare has NO proviision to roll back the HIPAA laws regarding medical privacy protection, which you can read HERE.

And FINALLY!!!…  snopes.com, which investigates these rumors, has declared this FALSE!!!!  You can check it out for yourself HERE, but for your idiot right wingnut conservative friends, if you print this out, here’s the actual web site:  http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/medicare.asp

Hope this settles the issue.  I’m interested to here the reaction you get.  And feel free to tell them to contact me if they want to fight against truth and logic. 

All the best, Howie