Thursday, April 16, 2009

Headlines - Thursday

 
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President Obama and his wife, Michelle, earned $2.73 million last year and paid $855,323 in federal taxes, "an amount that would be higher by about $102,000 if his budget plan were in effect."

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On the same day the wingnuts were protesting high taxes, President Barack Obama gave a speech to again tout the benefits (namely the tax cuts) that are a part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package. Included in that sweeping legislation was his signature two-year "Making Work Pay" tax break that the administration says affects 95 percent of working families. The president said he was taking unprecedented action to give tax cuts to people who most need them. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/tax-day-obama-speaking-on_n_187099.html
 
I guess next year it will just be the rich people having the tea bagging parties.
 
Tea
 
 
Yeah dude in your dreams.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And where were they 8 years ago?
 
Yesterday there were many teabag rallies across the country. They got together to protest reckless government spending or the large deficits the Obama administration is racking up implementing their policy. My only question is this: where were these people 8 years ago? More importantly, where were these people 30 years ago?

Under Reagan, the budget was never balanced and debt ballooned. In fact, under Reagan the total debt/GDP ratio increased from a little over 30% to a little over 60%. Yet there were no protests. And the fact the budget was never balanced didn't seem to bother anybody. Of course, you could argue that the current teabaggers weren't around then so this doesn't count.

But when Bush took office the exact same thing happened. According to the Cato Institute, the Republican Party became the "Grand Old Spending Party." Bush was the biggest spender since LBJ. Here is what the Cato Institute wrote:

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn't cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.


Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush's first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton's last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush's first term.

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

Yet there were no protests. And here is a report from the Bureau of Public Debt of the annual federal debt outstanding at the end of the last 8 federal fiscal years:

09/30/2008    $10,024,724,896,912.49
09/30/2007    $9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2006    $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2005    $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2004    $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2003    $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2002    $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2001    $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000    $5,674,178,209,886.86

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, it's obvious what's going on. Republican/conservative rank and file are protesting because they are out of power and their leadership is terrible. But they aren't protesting spending; they are protesting the Democratic Party's governance. And that is fine. But please, don't tell me it's about spending or debt. If that were the case, you guys should have taken to the streets years ago.

 
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Somalia pirating began in response to illegal fishing and toxic dumping by western boats off Somali coast. http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/27389 

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That DHS domestic terror report isn't about the tea parties - it's about the Poplawskis: http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/dhs-domestic-terror-report-isnt-abou
 
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Sorry, it all seems to be about teabagging news today
 
Teabaggers: idiots, wastes of perfectly good oxygen: http://www.cogitamusblog.com/
 
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GOP party boss Rush Limbaugh is no longer content merely to wish that Pres. Obama, and thus the U.S. government will fail. Now he's also expressing sympathy for the Somali pirates. Those poor, black teenagers that Obama gave the order to kill.
 
Well guess what, Rush? A new poll shows just how out of touch you are: 

Nearly nine-out-of-10 voters (89%) nationwide approve of President Obama's decision to use Navy SEALs to rescue U.S. commercial ship captain Richard Phillips by killing his Somali pirate kidnappers. Phillips was being held hostage after the pirates botched an attempt to hijack his ship. Just three percent (3%) disapprove.

Rush's own team is even more on Obama's side on this one.

Ninety-six percent (96%) of Republicans, 91% of unaffiliateds and 83% of Democrats approve of the decision to rescue the captain by killing the kidnappers.

Limbaugh's latest tirade, defending the pirates as "teenagers" who were "upset" and "just wanted out of there," comes at a particularly bad time for mouth-breathers. Many on the political right (and by many we mean, actually, many) are questioning the leaders of the so-called conservative movement, which has lost itself in social issues and can't seem to find a working target in Obama. FOX News is drawing the most attention.

Even Fox's own Shepard Smith seems to be uncomfortable with the new trend, frequently mocking Beck on live TV and referring to his show as a "fear chamber."

While not as specific in their targets, there have been some other eyebrow-raising commentaries from the right recently, calling for a more fair-minded approach. Few would ever accuse David Horowitz, author of books like Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, of shying away from strong language, but even he took up the cause of civility recently, penning a widely distributed column this month accusing conservatives of falling prey to "Obama derangement syndrome."

…Horowitz added that Obama should be given credit for pursuing policies in Afghanistan and Iraq largely supported by mainstream conservatives. His criticism that Obama can't catch a break from the right seemed to resonate with Fox News regular Bernard Goldberg, who recently got into a surprise tussle with Sean Hannity over whether Obama deserved praise for the Navy SEALs successful rescue operation in Somalia.

"If something bad happened here… I'll tell you who would have been leading the crusade against him—you," Goldberg told Hannity.

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Sign the petition! Pass the word on to Norm Coleman that it's time for him to back down.

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Read the whole thing, but here's a snip:
 
It pains me to say this as an American, but we are the only people on earth dumb enough to use a nationwide campaign of "teabag parties" as a form of mass protest, in the middle of a real economic crisis. 
 
After all, the reason the winger crowd can't find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other.
 
That's why even people like Beck's audience, who I'd wager are mostly lower-income people, can't imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who f'd them over. 
 
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Last week a Rasmussen poll revealed that only a little more than half of all Americans are in the thrall of capitalism as the preferred economic system, and today in the Washington Post Harold Meyerson  elaborates a bit further on why the numbers broke the way they did.

So where do these numbers come from? Rasmussen didn't provide any data that clarify causality, but I think it's safe to infer that the havoc that Wall Street has wreaked upon the world over the past year and its reliance on American taxpayers to bail it out haven't exactly helped capitalism's cause.

But there's more to these numbers. For one thing, they signal that the link between socialism and anti-Americanism has been weakened and, among the young, all but destroyed. The end of Soviet communism has meant that the United States no longer has a major adversary that professes to be socialist. The one remaining powerful Communist Party, China's, has opted for a capitalist economy. The violent threats to America today come from a branch of Islamic fundamentalists who wage war on all forms of modernity, socialism among them. And the actual existing socialists today are the social democrats who govern or are the chief opposition parties in Western Europe -- home to the nations with which we are most closely allied.

The Soviet Union's collapse is surely responsible for some of the variations by age group that turn up in Rasmussen's polling: Thirty-somethings, while not quite so socialistic as 20-somethings, remain decidedly cooler on capitalism than their elders. The Left Bank of the Seine doesn't quite convey the terror that Stalin's gulag once inspired.

Imagine that.  

The twenty- and thirty-somethings are the wave that swept Barack Obama into office, and they are not cowed by the rhetoric of the right.  They frankly find it silly.  The right wing hasn't found an issue to rally 'round since the Soviet Union collapsed, and being the party of no ideas, they retreaded the old 'red scare' chestnut in a desperate attempt to sully the name of Obama.  In their infinite idiocy, they linked a term that has lost it's sting with the most popular young president of my lifetime.  And whadya know?  Instead of dragging Obama down, the image of "socialism" was rehabilitated.  

Somewhere, Karl Marx and Eugene V. Debs are laughing their asses off at the right-wing lunatics who have done what they couldn't manage...made Socialism acceptable in America.  

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Lead Republican intellectual Michael Savage (Wiener), writing on one of the most important publications for the right wing noise machine, WingNutDaily, is concerned about a new report about domestic extremists issued by Homeland Security. Apparently, Savage is convinced that the report is proof that "rogue homosexual elements" are operating within Homeland Security. 

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I don't know ...

But I figure that if I'd have stood outside the White House (and the Chimp still lived there) yelling "Death to the President" yesterday, I'd already be on my way to Gitmo in an orange jumpsuit with a Koran shoved up my ass.
 
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If you want to see true right-wing extremism in action, watch Frontline World's Children of the Taliban.
 
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Stay classy Rick Perry, you jackass:
 
.... 

Perry called his supporters patriots. Later, answering news reporters' questions, Perry suggested Texans might at some point get so fed up they would want to secede from the union, though he said he sees no reason why Texas should do that.

"There's a lot of different scenarios," Perry said. "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

I'm sure you all remember when, in 2003, after the population of lefty liberal leftistan California, enraged by Bush taking us to war in Iraq, boisterously cheered Gray Davis as he debated secession. Oh, wait.

If Texas were to secede, does that mean that none of the Bushies would be eligible to run for office? 'Cause I'd be cool with that.

FYI: Earlier this week, Perry signed onto a nonbinding resolution claiming the federal government had overstepped its Constitutional authority. "I believe the federal government has become oppressive. I believe it's become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state," Perry declared.

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I am shocked, shocked to learn that 

the National Security Agency has been vastly "overcollecting" the telephone calls and e-mails of Americans.
Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in "overcollection" of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.
"Unintentional", my ass. Anybody who is surprised by any of this clearly has either not been paying attention or has spent the last eight years drunk on the Kool-Aid of the Bush Administration. Those who were paying attention to how the NSA was going about doing its unconstitutional work warned that this was going to happen.

Of course, some of it was not exactly an accident:
... in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Big surprise, there. What would be less of a surprise would be to find out that Dick Cheney or his chief henchman, David Addington, had something to do with it.

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Ten Republican lies for tax day: http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/10-republican-lies-tax-day

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Want to know what the teabaggers should really be crying about?

In 2008, despite the worst economic meltdown in over 75 years, U.S. chief executives continued to take home over 300 times more pay than their workers. That's a gap ten times wider than the gap between top execs and workers that existed just a generation ago.

Corporate boards of directors seem determined to keep this massive gap intact. Most corporations are refusing to make even symbolic gestures toward more common-sense executive compensation.

Remember last fall's firestorm over executive jets? In 2008, over half America's big corporations — 104 of the 200 the Wall Street Journal tracked — continued to foot the bill for the personal air travel of their top executives, only three fewer than the year before.

CEOs have to report the personal air travel subsidies they get, along with whatever other perks they receive, as taxable income. Over a third of America's biggest corporations last year actually gave their executives extra money to pay the taxes on all this perk income.

The dollars devoted to this tax reimbursing — or "grossing up," as power suits refer to the process — averaged $16,400 last year. That sum might not sound like much, given the millions CEOs take home overall, but, in 2008, average American workers had to labor five months to make $16,400.

The Wall Street Journal doesn't include perks like free air travel and tax gross-ups in its $7.6 million figure for 2008 CEO "direct compensation." The New York Times $8.4 million total does.

Neither paper's pay totals for 2008 include the gains CEOs registered last year cashing out the stock options they collected in previous years. These cashouts generated some staggering personal paydays.

Occidental Petroleum's Ray Irani, for instance, took home $49.9 million in "total direct compensation," according to the Wall Street Journal figures. But he gained another $215.9 million in 2008 from options and other long-term "incentives" that Occidental had stuffed in his personal portfolio before last year.

Corporate boards have essentially created what amounts to a perpetual motion pay machine that year in and year out gins up millions in executive compensation, no matter what may be happening economically in the real world.

In "good" times, with revenues and profits up, boards hand executives stock awards and cash bonuses as rewards for their fine "performance." In hard times, boards keep the stock awards coming — as an incentive to stick around and perform better in the future.

And thus continues the delusion that the wealthy are the most productive members of society which requires that they be allowed to dictate the terms by which the burden of their failure and mismanagement is borne by others.

The corporate aristocrats are working hard to keep the rubes focused on the big, bad gummint because if they ever realize just how thoroughly they've been scammed by these Masters of the Universe, who knows what might happen?

Read the entire post if you can. The AFL-CIO has a nice site called: Executive PayWatch: CEO Perks Rise as Workers' Wages, Jobs Wilt

 

 

 

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