President Obama was caught on an open microphone making some very interesting remarks about the Republicans and their recent 2011 budget negotiations to keep the government funded for the remainder of this fiscal year. The President, unaware that the microphones were on recalls, among other things, the unsuccessful reasoning given by representatives of John Boehner, in reference to repealing Health care.
Listen to the audio below.
Last time we heard about Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic Congressman was questioning whether or not President Obama should be impeached for his actions in Libya. Kucinich believes he should be.
Today, Kucinich somewhat redeemed himself and was able to reconnect with his Democratic roots during his questioning of Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker. Walker went to congress to give his testimony about his recent actions of stripping Wisconsin’s public employees of their collective bargaining rights. Mr. Walker has always maintained that taking away these rights from Wisconsin’s public employees was a necessary step towards deficit reduction.
Enter Dennis Kucinich;
KUCINICH: Let me ask you about some of the specific provisions in your proposals to strip collective bargaining rights. First, your proposal would require unions to hold annual votes to continue representing their own members. Can you please explain to me and members of this committee how much money this provision saves for your state budget?
WALKER: That and a number of other provisions we put in because if you’re going to ask, if you’re going to put in place a change like that, we wanted to make sure we protected the workers of our state, so they got value out of that.
KUCINICH: Would you answer the question? How much money does it save, Governor?
WALKER: It doesn’t save any.
KUCINICH: I want to ask about another one of your proposals. Under your plan you would prohibit paying union member dues from their paychecks. How much money would this provision save your state budget?
WALKER: It would save employees a thousand dollars a year they could use to pay for their pensions and health care contributions.
KUCINICH: Governor, it wouldn’t save anything.
I think Kucinich wins…!
It is an obvious game of chicken and well-played by the Republicans. The object of the game is to establish your position in a metaphoric staring contest, wait to see who blinks first, then take all you can and run!
Think about it. Every single policy that involves negotiations, Republicans take the most extreme right winged position available. They then go on the so-called “main-stream media” and repeat their extreme arguments over and over and over again, in essence brainwashing otherwise rational Americans into thinking these far-fetched positions are normal.
After a constant barrage of talking points from every congressional Republican who gets in front of a microphone or camera, these extreme positions take on a life of their own, as everyday folks begin to consider the possibilities of enacting these policies. People take up positions, usually along party lines, and the pros and cons are measured.
Democrats too, hear these arguments, for they are repeated by every single congressional Republican verbatim. So when the time comes to negotiate, Democrats, who tend to start in the middle, move more and more to the right, a move seen by Republicans as progress in the negotiations, and the end result is a piece of legislation that is somewhere between center and far right.
Look at the most recent negotiations between Democrats and Republicans – the 2011 budget. Weeks before the deadline arrived, Republicans gathered all their talking points, memorized them and spewed them out on every cable and radio network. The most extreme positions were demanding a $100 billion budget cut, defunding Education, defunding Planned Parenthood and stopping abortions, with no regards to women’s health or how she conceived – whether it be through rape or incest – and with no regards to the health or survivability of the fetus. They also got bombarded with news from across the nation that Republican governors were enacting some of the most extreme policies this country has seen in decades regarding union collective bargaining capabilities. All this was done in unison, as the full effort to modify America’s thinking had begun.
As the deadline to agree on a budget approached, Republicans dug in even further. They were relentless in getting their message out, everyone reciting the same scripts, some even protesting outside of Harry Reid’s office demanding that Planned Parenthood be abolished. Democrats were not immune to the Republican’s efforts, and instead of taking up what many considered to be traditional liberal positions on the issues, found themselves being more centrist in order to avoid looking as left-winged extremists.
Starting from this centrist position was an automatic win for the Republicans, but they continued digging in until the eleventh hour – literally! Democrats gave a little more, and the total outcome was an agreement to continue funding the government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, but considerable cuts to programs geared towards saving lives, like the EPA and local police enforcement, as well as some cuts to Education among others. Cuts totaling $38.5 billion.
Republicans are masters of the art of negotiation. Take the most extreme positions, and stay there until the other side flinches.
The same strategy will be seen in the next big fight – raising the debt ceiling. And the Paul Ryan Plan, which will ultimately transfer $4.2 trillion from the middle class to the wealthy, is the extreme right winged position they will be using to get more centrist-right cuts. And their position now is, if Ryan’s plan doesn’t go into effect, then the debt ceiling will not be raised. Turn on your cable news station, and you are almost guaranteed to see Republicans preaching that “we don’t have a tax problem, we have a spending problem,” and “Ryan’s proposed budget is the only responsible plan to tackle America’s long-term debt,” or that they only “intend to vote for Ryan’s budget cuts.”
They are a well oiled machine. But this game is not solitaire, so it requires an opponent. Democrats must stand up for the middle class, like they’ve done for decades.
Democrats know the game being played by the Republicans, and they must play accordingly. In the words of GI-Joe, a favorite American hero: “… knowing is half the battle!”
Take a few minutes out of your day to keep it real. Be honest, we’ve seen this movie before. The heroes and villains are as staged as professional wrestling. The soap opera dramas of “All My Children”, “Young And The Restless” and the others have nothing on the modern day “Hatfields & McCoys” that is the Democratic and Republican parties.
Stop lying…and stop lying to yourself by allowing yourself to be lied to. We’ve been like masochists, addicted to abuse. Or an abused wife that suffers through the pain and makes excuses for her husband’s abuse of her. All the right words will be spoken and promises made, some by well meaning candidates…some by career politicians who know full well the powerlessness of their post to effect actual progress but are content in being “the face man” of authority. The truth is ‘HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER CALLS THE TUNE’.
The reason universal healthcare was watered down and made to order for the insurance companies is because those companies financial contributions to those with the ‘power’ of the pen. According to Barack Obama himself, America’s health industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and to stall other proposed legislation. Corporate power at work. There are two wars going on right now that benefit absolutely nobody but corporate interests and the weapons merchants that get paid to arm both sides of the conflict. Again, corporate interests at work.
The once great continent of Africa and all its natural resources is fertile ground for imperialists and multi-national corporate “investors” with the help of the military and propaganda to continue becoming the new legalized slave masters of the indigenous people. But don’t expect this to be a topic of interest in any presidential election, you see those same corporate investors have invested in the candidates. The 2009 election was infested with financial pay dirt. JP Morgan Chase funded both McCain and Obama, Morgan Stanley funded both McCain and Obama, Citigroup funded both candidates as well, the list of corporate hush money donations go on… and on. These are the aforementioned ‘payers of the piper’, they are the ones calling the tunes by which we dance.
“What?” you say. “No way, surely we would’ve been hipped to this”.
Really?
General Electric’s media holdings include MSNBC, BRAVO and Telemundo. Disney, another multinational, multi-tentacled, multi mind-bending corporation controls 277 radio stations and the ABC network. There are others; Viacom, Time Warner etc., These are main sources of information and so called news for the vast majority of people. A corporations job is to expand, to grow, not to care for those trampled upon as a result of their expansion efforts. So since our sources of information are fitered through them, since our politicians are outright owned by them, since our minds have been reduced to mere robotic consumers of their products…I am appealing to us to recognize that we can’t afford to believe that we have permanent friends in the white house. Black or white. If the politician, the preacher, teacher or corporation is not serving our best interests, the only corporation that will… starts in the mirror.
Son of Man
Call it buyer’s remorse, a recall on faulty merchandise. Or call it a demand for a refund due to false advertising. Whatever you call it, Americans are beginning to see that this batch of Republicans in Congress are not what they had bargained for.
A new PPP poll finds that just a few months after handing the control of the House of Representatives over to the Republican party, 43% think John Boehner and company are doing a worse job than Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats did when they were in charge.
The poll finds that even among Independents, Republicans have lost support;
Independents say by a 44-30 margin that Republicans have been doing worse. Further, 48% trust President Obama more to lead the country in the right direction, while 42% have more faith in the GOP. The sentiment with independents is 49-37 for Obama.
And when it comes to the question of who is the most extreme, Americans point the finger directly to the Republicans as the nut-jobs;
Americans also see the Democratic Party as being more mainstream (46%) than extremist (39%). Their opinion of the GOP is almost the opposite: 40% see that party as mainstream, and 48% as extremist. Independents say by a 49-33 margin that the GOP is extremist and by a 49-36 margin that the Democrats are mainstream
Based on these findings, Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling expressed his opinion on the Democrats chances in the next election;
“The conventional wisdom is that Democrats will have a very hard time winning back control of the House next year, but that may be wrong- voters have soured on the new Republican majority in record time.
Soured is not the word. Is there some way we can pack this group of Republicans up and ship them off to a country more suitable for them? Like Somalia?
CS News picked up on this.
On March 30th, before any agreement on budget cutting was reached, the federal debt stood at $14.2101 trillion, according to the Bureau of Public Debt. During the next 8 days, which culminated with The White House and John Boehner agreeing to $38.5 billion in budget cuts, the federal debt increased by $54.1 billion dollars.
Ultimately, budget affect the deficit. Maybe if these two governing bodies had spent more time concentrating on coming up with solutions to the country’s problems, instead of wasting time and money butting heads at every corner, we will have some actual debt reductions taking place.
But after all, these are politicians, and to them, party means much more than country.
Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona who fought tooth and nail to make her racial profiling bill become law, took yet another blow on Monday when the United States of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit called the law “unconstitutional”:
PHOENIX — The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the State of Arizona on Monday and let stand a lower court decision blocking the most contentious parts of the state’simmigration law from going into effect.
The decision calling the provisions unconstitutional was a victory for the Obama administration, which argued that the law interfered with the federal government’s authority over immigration. Two judges ruled against Arizona, and one dissented in part from them.
Last July, just days before the law was to take effect, Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District Court issued an injunction blocking parts of it. Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican who supports the crackdown on immigrants, filed an appeal seeking to have the injunction lifted.
After the appeals court rejected the state’s request on Monday and issued a lengthy decision indicating that it believed the state had overstepped its authority, State Senator Russell K. Pearce, a Republican who is the principal sponsor of the law, remained defiant, saying the issue would ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
Although she’s been wrong on just about every decision she’s made for her state, you’ve got to hand it to this Republican Governor. She is persistent, even if it means her persistence is in direct opposition to the Constitution. But then again, today’s Republican haven’t shown much respect for the Constitution anyways.
With all the new Birther attention drummed up by Donald Trump, one would be wise to ask the obvious question; why wouldn’t President Obama just hand over his birth certificate and stop all this nonsense.
Well, although that may well be the best thing to do, it seems that even the president of the United States doesn’t have the authority to get a copy of his own birth record. The law in Hawaii prohibits any vital records from being transferred or even photocopied. This report complements of MSNBC.
Joshua Wisch, the spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of “vital records,” including an original “record of live birth” — even to the individual whose birth it records.
“It’s a Department of Health record and it can’t be released to anybody,” he said. Nor do state laws have any provision that authorizes such records to be photocopied, Wisch said. If Obama wanted to personally visit the state health department, he would be permitted to inspect his birth record, Wisch said.
But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated “certification of live birth” form that everybody else gets — which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.
So although the best way to stop this bogus conspiracy by the Birthers would be to get a copy of the president’s birth certificate, he will be breaking the law if he tries.
What a position this president finds himself in. He supplied all he could legally, and still, it is not good enough. If he breaks the law, these same folks will demand impeachment and possible jail time.
He can’t win. They won’t allow it!
Words of wisdom coming from America’s favorite sitcom dad. Bill Cosby appeared on Good Day America and said what many Americans have been saying since Donald Trump started pandering to the Teaparty and Birthers – if you’re gonna run, run!
Everyone knows the real reason for Donald Trump’s sudden interest in politics, and it has nothing to do with…, well, politics. Bill Cosby saw right through the newbie birther, and called him out on his so-called aspirations.
Keith Olberman… yes, that Keith Olbermann – has been keeping up on the nonsense that is today’s Republican party. Here, in this Worst Persons Of The Day edition, our favorite orange, John Boehner wins hands down.
Ladies and gentleman, Keith Olbermann…
Obviously he’s meant to be a distraction. And obviously he has no intention of running for president and quitting his day job as one of the richest men in America to take a pay cut as president of the US.
Obviously, he’s not the only one involved in his rhetoric over Obama not being an American citizen. And obviously he’s got no proof on anything he says or does regarding his info on the President’s birth certificate or lack thereof. And obviously he has no agents in Hawaii searching for secret birth information either.
Obviously Donald Trump is a played out, media whore, diva looking to get the ratings up on his show – the one that pits pitiful Hollywood has-beens up against each other vying for the oppurtunity to kiss his pinky ring -“The Apprentice”. And obviously there will be no one of great importance backing his run for the presidency in 2012 but him, the Teabaggers and his millions, cuz the only one whose actually “begged” him to run was his reflection in a mirror.
However, and more important than Trump and his crap, is why it seems that there is no moral compass for the so -called ‘right winged’ political party? And I’m not just talking about lourding over others about how they’re right and everyone else … just isn’t. I’m talking about your everyday ‘basics’ of morality, particularly in the public eye. The basic tenets of the Ten Commandments of the Bible if you will: don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t covet, don’t steal, don’t be a pig etc.,
Why do we have politicians -who I’ve always thought should exemplify civility and fair play, sound reasoning, good judgement, common sense and intelligence – who get up in front of a captive audience or television camera just to show the world that they know absolutely nothing about anything yet still aspire to the presidency?
And why the void of intelligence? Is it considered too liberal to be … smart? Instead of requests for a birth certificate, shouldn’t the Birthers be requesting I.Q. test results (which also btw tests for information retention; comprehension; common sense; a fund of factual information … helpful stuff for a politician to have, no?!) from a reputable bi-partisan monitoring organization on anyone who’s even thinking of getting into the political arena. This way we don’t waste a perfectly good vote on someone who might need to rethink their career options.
How proud would you be to be an American knowing that the likes of a Michele Bachman, a Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney or Donald Trump might represent the best we could come up with as leader of the country?
Really?
Yesterday, the news broke that Scott Walker gave the son of one of his donors a state job with a 26% raise in salary totaling $81,500 a year. Today, little Scottie mysteriously found a reason to demote the 27 year old, and took away the raise. JS Online reports;
Gov. Scott Walker abruptly reversed course today and demoted the son of a large campaign contributor to his former job with the state Department of Regulation and Licensing.The move comes one day after the Journal Sentinel reported that Brian Deschane, 27, had landed an $81,500-a-year job in Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. The promotion amounted to a raise of 26%.
His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and longtime lobbyist for the Madison-based Wisconsin Builders Association. The group’s political action committee gave $29,000 to Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, last year, making it one of the top five PAC donors to the governor’s successful campaign. Members of the trade group also funneled more than $92,000 through its conduit to Walker’s campaign over the past two years.
The younger Deschane has no college degree, little management experience and two drunken driving convictions.
Still waiting for the news when Walker demotes himself.
