“Republicans ridicule the jobs bill as a grab bag of pork-barrel projects that would do little to help the economy… Democrats say the extra spending for everything from public works to child immunization is needed to create jobs that have been slow to come out of the sluggish recovery.

The GOP campaign against the bill threatened Democratic plans to get the completed measure before Congress recesses for two weeks. That still could happen - but the start of the break might be delayed beyond its scheduled start tonight.

Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, indicated he would force Republicans to vote daily on motions to choke off the debate, perhaps starting as early as today.

Eventually, Democrats contend, some Republicans will cave in because the bill includes money to extend unemployment benefits to many of the nation’s long-term unemployed.”

No. This is not today. This is from a news article in 1993, when Clinton was in office. The situation was similar to our current one, yet not quite as grave. Despite an economy in tatters (courtesy of the first Bush), Republicans STILL felt the need to play their little political games as obstructionists - and Democrats, against good common sense, threw pork at the problem.

What’s going the CHANGE? Who knows. I hate to be cynical. It’s the easy thing to do - and I want younger people to have some hope for their government to start doing some of the things it says it’s going to do. I think if anyone has the moral authority to command this change, it will be Obama - but if he were to learn one thing from Bush (and one thing is about all you can learn), it would be that the strong arm approach is not distasteful.

Lyndon Johnson pushed through alot of good social programs during a short time in office, precisely because he was a tough guy and an arm twister. Carter, on the other hand, accomplished little in office and, although he has redeemed himself post-Presidency, was known as a bit of a wimp while in office. Obama cannot allow himself to follow that path.

In short, I really don’t think the Congress or the Senate has our best interests in mind when they make law and dole out cash. I know this seems like an elementary thing to say, but it really needs to be said and heard: CONGRESS AND SENATE DO NOT HAVE OUR BEST INTERESTS IN MIND.

That being a given, we really need to get more involved in our government. Another elementary call-to-action, but no less true.

This past summer I was at a festival in my county and confronted my Senator about having withdrawal guidelines built into that Iraq funding bill. He hemmed and hawed, threw out the party line that “we have to support our troops and not hinder their success” - and this guy was a democrat. I wish I had told him to go fuck himself. At least then he might have realized he was voted into office and not ordained. Nonetheless, there are things we can do to get these people’s attention.

PRWeb.com

For $80 dollars we can send out a press release outlining our expectations from the Congress and Senate regarding this stimulus package. The press release will appear on popular news sites such as Yahoo News, Google, MSN news, PrNewswire and others. I’ve been pondering this solution for a while - considering that a hell of a lot more than $80 is coming out of my pocket for this package anyway. Heck, if enough people are willing to contribute a testimonial and a buck, we could send out a few of these.

Politicians, unfortunately, expect you to have a short memory about all these things. Most of the time they are right. What I would suggest you do is remember this time, this challenge and their response - and be willing to bring it up to them 10 or 15 years from now when they do the same things all over again.

Politics congress, government corruption, Obama, pelosi, republican blockers, stimulus package

Middle school was when I first discovered what I will call “The Impenetrable Wall.” There was a kid in 8th grade who made fun of me consistently. It became so unbearable that I descended and climbed two flights of stairs just to avoid dealing with him and his friends - three shrimpy hanger-ons’ who acted as a greek chorus. At first I thought I could reason with him. Thus, the introduction to the Impenetrable wall - there’s no reasoning with a bully.

After one particularly tough day in October, I decided I’d had enough. I would take care of this guy now and for good. I asked my dad to teach me how to fight that weekend. On Monday, I put on a flexible T-shirt and informed my parents the Principal’s office would very likely give them a call sometime before 9:00am, resulting in an after school suspension. They were good with it. They understood.

As I ambled down that hallway that I had avoided for so many weeks, sure as rain, this moron began his tirade. His friends chimed in. I had three books in my hands and approached him. I said, “Listen, man. You really don’t need to make fun of me.”

What he didn’t know was that this line was used to make him comfortable - let him think he was dealing with a wimp and that nothing had changed. It gave him carte blanche to say to me whatever was on his puny little mind.

Before he could utter a single word, I cracked him in the jaw. The next four punches were in his stomach, as hard as I could hit him. He had no idea what was happening. He threw a single punch which grazed my left cheek, but really didn’t connect. Then he grabbed my hair and pulled me into a head lock. Tough guy, grabbing hair. At that point I figured everything goes, so I grabbed HIS hair and pulled as hard as I could. Shortly after that a teacher broke it up. I got an out of school suspension - was the superstar the next day. His reputation never recovered. His shrimpy friends abandon him. As far as I was concerned, he brought this on himself.

This is the situation Obama currently finds himself in, with one caviat.

The Republican minority is attempting to present themselves as our champions. They want to trim the bill, make sure it “helps the real people of the country, the middle class.” Funny. They didn’t seem to care all that much about us while in office for 8 years. The democrats, on the other hand, are a little too high on the fumes of the last election success. Much like everything else they fuck up, they are about to do the same here - plugging unnecessary garbage into this stimulus bill.

Obama has been as courteous as he can with both sides of the isle. He’s found out that his brand of unity doesn’t play very well with people who see compromise as a weakness. It’s too bad. The country has some real problems to work out but, unfortunately, we’re dealing with children - 14-year-old’s in the Senate and Congress who think that just because you don’t look like the toughest guy in the room you’re easily manipulated - and they look at this stimulus package as a game.

It’s time for Obama to drop his books, get his punches in and change the game. He has to be tough with these idiots or he’s lose. There is no reasoning with a bully. Change will not come easily. It has to be earned with a few bruises. Now is the time to give that first punch while they still think they’re in control. The rest will be easy.

Politics Barack Obama, democrats, fighting republicans, Obama

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said in the interview published Wednesday.

I used to live in Los Angeles for a few years. Anyone who’s lived there knows it’s a one-horse town, and that horse is the Entertainment industry. Those with an itch to enter it has made the pilgrimage out there at least once. Anyway, I never warmed to the place. First of all, there’s very little variety. Most of the conversations you have center around films. There’s a huge gap between rich and poor - and you end up living in a bubble; the space between where you live, where you go and who you meet and the hours in between where you’re in your car.

The day I left town to move elsewhere was like taking in air again. It took me an hour and a half in the car, just at the edge of the desert, to find the fog of 5 years lifting. I remember saying to myself, “What the hell was I thinking all these years.” All at once I realized anew the world wasn’t about the small microcosm of L.A. and that industry. The pressures and motivations of my life there were all constructed within the fabrication of that little bubble and really didn’t exist outside of there. By the time I got to my new home I was a changed man. Infrequently I meet friends who still live there and are still caught up in that mousetrap - still chasing an imaginary carrot and living within that strange, cloistered culture that rarely lets the real world penetrate. They’re friends, and I love them, but I wish they could see what I see.

I feel the same way when I talk to people who are still wrapped up in this fabricated world that Bush and Cheney have created. They built it on the platform of fear and kept us all scared. In Cheney’s case, maybe he really believed this shit - still does. Fortunately, most of the country has pulled itself out of this fog and can see what morally corrupt, lying charlatans these people have been.

No one is ever saying we need to go soft on terrorists. No one has EVER said that, certainly not Obama (even though the far right will do their damndest to make you think he has). These are words that only exist in the fabricated world of the past administration, one where everything is black and white. Either you treat all our prisoners like garbage, or you’re a terrorist sympathizer.

It’s time for everyone who’s scared to rediscover what the real world looks like out there, and have the courage to stay in it. Cheney’s Pottersville of Fear and Conformity needs to become a ghost town soon, so we can get on with the real fights ahead.

Politics bush, cheney, fear, Obama, terrorism

The former Senate majority leader apologized Monday for failing to pay his taxes in full. He said earlier he was “deeply embarrassed” for a series of errors which include failing to report $15,000 in charitable donations, unreported car service and more than $80,000 in unreported income from consulting.

You’re shitting me, right? I’m a businessman. I have a corporation. I file my taxes on time and am extremely careful about making sure that every penny I get is accounted for as either income or specific payment against expenses. So really we have one of two situations here. Daschle is a fraud, lying to congress about his tax hiccup, or he’s really as dumb as he’s shown himself to be in the past.

$80,000 of consulting fees as “unreported income.”

This man was painfully unqualified in his last position as the U.S. Senator Senate Majority. He was so weak-kneed against the republicans that he deserved not only to be booted out of his post but voted out of his seat. Obama’s got to do better than this.

Here’s my suggestion: Find people outside of politics. People who actually KNOW these departments. Remember Tommy Thompson? What qualifications did he have to be deciding for our country regarding flu viruses and Cipro. Now that I recall, we were undersupplied on both accounts.

Politics Daschle, health and human services, Obama, Tommy Thompson

Back during Reagan, I found myself in a continuous debate with friends who aggressively defended the Iran Contra situation. It was the first time I really had to study up before a discussion. The studying wasn’t simply to allow myself the opportunity to grasp details and facts quicker in the heat of argument, but to actually HAVE facts and defend them.

You see, most of my friends on the conservative side, as now, react to issues based purely on emotion. What I’ve always found disheartening is that the conservative politicians feed into this. My earliest memories of Nixon was his sometimes not so subtle attacks on the counter-culture and his call for the “silent majority” to speak up through his candidacy. Reagan, on the other hand, was an optimistic minimalist - he saw little sense in trying to get the electorate to understand even some of the complexities of the issues of the day and would rather sell them a simple idea - tax cuts and trickle down economics, Kadafi as the new Hitler, Granada as the new battleground for freedom.

Bush has been a multiplication of all the worst aspects of Reagan and Nixon. He fed us fear as a motivator, simplified complex economic tools such as tax cuts into across-the-board disasters that have enriched that top 1 percent, trickled very little down, and left the rest of us holding the financial bag. He asked for no sacrifices during war, and instead prodded us to do what he’s been doing his entire life - spend, spend, spend, don’t worry about the debt (daddy will help you out) and forget about personal financial responsibility in any area of your life. Wars are black and white, you have enemies and friends and nothing in between. Saddam isn’t the new Hitler, all Muslims are. Believe what I tell you because you can trust me. Science and complex thinking are for wimps. Go with your gut.

Well, here we are 8 years later. This compassionate conservative has divided the country so severely we are on the verge of ruin emotionally, economically, militarily and ethically. Obama has a tough hill to climb to get us out.

Unfortunately for him, the dead-enders still think they have a place in this process, demands they can make. Well, as far as I’m concerned, when you screw everything up as much as you have you deserve no place at the table until you can learn to get along with everyone else. Neocons live today in a fantasy world where time has stood still and our current President is just another Jimmy Carter with a slightly darker complexion. They STILL feel they are right in all areas (despite the fact that the entire Bush agenda has lead to multi-pronged failures), that McCain would have won had it not been for the media, and the Democrats haven’t changed one iota since the 1960s. What they don’t know and can’t understand is that the country has moved past them, that they are the relics of a different time and the old way of politics has no place in the future.

Sure, things change little in the short term, but at least now we can see the horizon past the moral and ethical wasteland given to us by the Bush-Cheney-DeLay-Boehner-Frist crew. So necons - stay where you are at your own peril. We really don’t care anymore about your ideas. They are bankrupt.

Politics, Verbal Paintball bush disaster, bush failure, McCain, neocons, Obama, republican fantasy world

“I’m more Mike Mansfield. I’m not LBJ — I don’t twist arms.” - Senator Harry Reid

Wrong response.

Obama is doing his best to bring a new tone to Washington, and I respect that. I think everyone out there agrees that tone is just a part of it - this system that rewards those with the deepest pockets to push change rather than those with the most human of ideas is corrupt and broken. Nothing short of an internal revolution would change that, and despite the times, people have no energy of stomach for such an uprising.

But Harry Reid is part of the problem. It’s a mystery to me how this milk-toast, ineffectual man can command anyone to do anything. He begins a poltical debate by making bold statements about being immovable, and then quietly (well, sometimes not so quietly) folds under the smallest of pressure. I would rather see him and the party go up in flames by standing boldly behind a bill rather than this pathetic giving in that happens with them every single time.

I’ve always felt that Obama’s biggest roadblock in office would be him and Pelosi. Getting them in line and forcing them to be held accountable for bad politics, no matter what the leaning might be, is the first step in creating the kind of government we need, rather than the one we have.

Both should be voted out of their positions, but it is unlikely that will happen anytime soon. Suggestions?

Politics democratic losers, harry reid, nancy pelosi, Obama, politics as usual