Mark Sanford's hike to the summit.

From Huffington Post:

Sanford apologized at a press conference to his family, and his staff at a press conference for “the way that I let them down.” He said he had a conversation with his father-in-law a few weeks ago about where “my heart was … laying my cards on the table.”

“There are moral absolutes, God’s law is indeed there to protect you from yourself. There are consequences if you breach that. This press conference is a consequence.”

At first it was not clear what Sanford was referencing.

“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife and I’ve developed a relationship with what stared as a dear, dear friend from Argentina,” he finally said. The affair has been going on for a year, he later explained

Several months back, Sanford was one of the primary republican voices on rejecting stimulus money. After discovering he could not stop it from arriving in his state, he decided, for purely political reason, that the money was not going to go to the programs and people it was intended for. He would shift it into paying off the state debt. Good representative of the people, isn’t he?

Well, he was apparently screwing more than just the people of his state - and doing so with complete disregard for proper protocol.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and judge this man’s affair. Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. He must have reached some crossroad. That’s not what is at issue here. It is the way he did it. What I expect to hear from the republican side is the following excuse:

“Well, Sanford may have lied to the state and his family, but at least he didn’t do it under oath.”

Yeah, well, the republicans have destroyed our economy, destroyed their moral authority, lied us into a war and bullied their way to bills that ONLY benefit the top 1% and the corporations. And now they have two of their own - two people who flew under the “I’m a moral Christian and you’re not because you’re a democrat” flag - within the last month that exposed themselves for the hypocrites they really were.

Sorry for his family. Sorry for his state. Not sorry for those who voted for him. They should have known better.

Verbal Paintball affair, Mark Sanford, stimulus

Terrific post from Examiner.com

So why would any of these governors turn down help for their neediest residents? Maybe it’s because all three have been named as potential challengers to Obama in 2012. Jindal is being rewarded with the official GOP response slot after the President’s speech tonight. He, along with Barbour and Sanford, should be giving a different kind of gift from voters: they should be bounced out of office when they’re up for re-election. Or, maybe jilted voters can act sooner. Like Illinois, these states can use an impeachment process to dump governors who put politics and personal gain ahead of the best interest of their residents.

The republican response last night was, in a word, pathetic. It was as if we were listening to people from another planet and time. And the politics of his statement was loathsome. Most of the public, it seems, agree.

Examiner.com

63% of Americans think the Republican congress opposed the stimulus package for political reasons.

74% of Americans believe that President Obama is trying to be bipartisan by reaching out to Republicans.

Please keep this up, Republicans. Your demise is very welcome from the rest of us who give a damn about this country.

Politics Bobby Jindal, depression, economy, Obama speech, republican response, stimulus

Courtesy CNN

From CNN:

Though they support some federal action to help their states recover from the recession, several Republican governors said Sunday they plan to turn down a portion of what’s offered in the stimulus bill that President Obama signed last week.

“If we were to take the unemployment reform package that they have, it would cause us to raise taxes on employment when the money runs out — and the money will run out in a couple of years,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

At issue is a portion of the unemployment assistance stipulated by the stimulus bill, which provides federal dollars to expand unemployment insurance in the states. In exchange for accepting that, states would have to expand the number of people who are given jobless benefits.

Once again, we have Republicans playing politics with our lives in the worst economy imaginable. Do they have any sense of proportion - at all? Are their petty, failed principles worth sacrificing the livelihood and survival of the people they’ve been hired to represent? I guess so.

I suppose their republican ideals - those ideals they were so quick to put aside when George Bush rolled his pork barrel into their states and let them pile on - are worth destroying lives for now that democrats are in office. Sure, they’ll try to make it seem like this is about more than their need to control the conversation and the legislation, but it’s not. It’s a temper tantrum - one that will cost many of us a great deal.

It cannot be emphasised enough that these people have squandered our futures with their dismal decisions. No one seems to realize that bad decisions have consequences. These people should learn this, but somehow it seems beyond that capability. Instead, they’ll spend their time (on your tax dollars) souring the conversation with partisan garbage that is largely opinion with nothing of fact to back it up. Besides, ask yourself this - when have these people been right about anything in the last decade? Any answers? Didn’t think so.

What they will do is turn down the unemployment provision and, when their state has more unemployed than employed, they will claim it’s due to the failure of the stimulus. Always blaming someone, this lot. Pathetic and unworthy of the offices they hold.

Current News, Politics republican blame, republican lies, stimulus, unemployment

My wife lost her job. During the last three years there have been 8 rounds of layoffs in her firm. This new round came just the other day. While the loss in business was steady through the last few declining years, I think it’s only fair to blame Barack Obama for this. He has been in office for almost a month.

Furthermore, my property and school taxes have risen over the past five years. My state has been receiving less money from the federal government due to the tax cuts. My taxes have risen from $4,800 in 2003 to $7,400 this last year. When I pay my next bill this week, I will blame Barack Obama. He was in office when I received that new statement. It must be his doing.

My stock portfolio had gone from something substantial in 2002 to petty change. I know Barack Obama has only been in office less than a month, but he IS responsible for the plunge of the stock market. The day he took office was the same day I received my Merrill Lynch statement. While it may have gone out into the mail before he took oath, it still must be his fault. Everything is, isn’t it?

My house is worth considerably less than it was in 2005. I know, I know. There’s been no regulation in this market and people with the same amount of petty change to their name that I currently have in my stock portfolio were being approved for loans. It’s true that those loans were sold in group packages to my broker, Merrill Lynch, and were then multiplied many more times as derivatives. It’s also true that George Bush was a great friend of business and felt oversight was unseemly. Still, even though my house went up in value in the last week, I blame Barack Obama. He should have known he was going to be President and everything was going to tank. Shame on him.

That guy who beheaded his wife last week? Well, that’s Barack Obama’s fault. He should have intervened. How dare he hold his head up high after not making some effort to thwart that tragedy.

The hundreds of thousands who’ve died in Iraq. You guessed it. His fault. It’s his responsibility now, so he should bear the responsibility for the entire war, even though he was against it. President Bush couldn’t be responsible. He’s too good a man. As we all know, everything bad that happened to him in the first five years of his Presidency was really Bill Clinton’s fault. The Republican congress and senate with their majorities? Nah. They couldn’t stop it. It was the Democrats who bullied them into this war. At the very least they were complicit since all the evidence showed Saddam has WMD’s.

Got a parking ticket the other day. It’s not my fault I parked facing out in the parking slot instead of in. Damn that Barack Obama.

Politics Barack Obama, blame game, George Bush, Katrina, Obama, political cowards, republican blame, stimulus, washington politics

Fear is not relative. We all find fear in our lives. The triggers are varied, but we always hope some element of logic breaks through that provides us with the real truth in each situation we face. In my life I’ve nearly drowned, was mugged and threatened, almost had someone break into my house (I could see him and his cohorts through my door peephole), have been in an airplane that’s lost it’s engine, survived the Northridge quake in 1994 and was in Manhattan on 9/11. I’m sure there have been many other moments, but these are the one’s that stand out, with two caviats: 9/11 wasn’t a fearful situation for me in the same way the Northridge quake was not - I was too busy trying to focus on my own survival to find the time to recognize the fear in these situations.

This is why I wasn’t surprised when the most fearful crowds during our nation’s worst day were everywhere but New York City. Everyone else had the chance to watch this event in slow motion, let it sink in, not have to deal with the real event right in front of their eyes - on the ground - like many of us had to. And while this is a completely natural human condition, in a democracy with a President and administration that made a decision to prey on that fear for political reasons, it does not exhonerate the fearful after the fact.

Here is a more scientific description of this experience from the Neurobiology of Fear by Laurel Duphiney Edmundson:

Studies of neuronal activity in the brain have suggested that the prefrontal cortex, a cognitive and emotional learning center that helps interpret sensory stimuli, is responsible for the conscious assessment of danger. After passing through the amygdala, sensory information is sent on to the cortex. There, the frightening stimulus is examined in detail to determine whether or not a real threat exists. Based on this information, the amygdala will be signaled either to perpetuate the physical response or to abort it. Because the amygdala is aroused before the cortex can accurately assess the situation, an individual will experience the physical effects of fear even in the case of a false alarm.

The folks who used to be in charge of our country understood the dynamics of fear well. Since Richard Nixon they’ve been utilizing it to drive the most fearful to the polls. In fact, many of the same players back then held similar positions during Bush. Today, it is the Republicans who continue to play that card to no avail. Our country doesn’t believe them anymore. In the wake of their stubborness on the stimulus, Obama HAS played the fear card these last few weeks. It was disappointing to me that he did this, however, I understood it was a shortcut to put pressure on the Republicans.

Obama should not play this game again. It was an easy approach for his first piece of legislation, one he felt had urgency at it’s back. My hope is that this practice becomes a thing of the past for the next 8 years so we can truly see what the real threats are and what are the false alarms.

As I’ve mentioned before, cowards are of no use in a democracy. The Republican leadership and it’s followers have essentially been that for a good part of their two terms. This practice must go.

Politics 9/11, fear in politics, Nixon, Northridge Quake, republican fear, stimulus

President Obama made it very clear in his first-ever press conference that republican politics of old had no place in this new era of government.

“As we learned very clearly and conclusively over the last eight years, tax cuts alone can’t solve all our economic problems, especially tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few Americans. We have tried that strategy time and time again, and it has only helped lead us to the crisis we face right now.”

Meanwhile, mental midgets like Richard Shelby yesterday called for the entire bill to be scrapped. Just as he had on the earlier TARP bill, he has decided to take Bob Dole’s old role of obstruction at all costs. The President made it crystal clear that the old conservative theories of stimulating the economy or doing nothing were unacceptable, the arguments of neanderthals still debating the necessity of the same type of programs during Roosevelt. 

I think Obama did himself a great service tonight by explaining to the many how and why this bill will work, the steps being taken to ensure it’s success, and the logic behind the approach. He also addressed that tired republican response suggesting all democrats are fiscally irresponsible, slather every program in pork, particularly this one. He called them on their lies and also didn’t pull punches when it came to pointing out the responsibility of our representatives as a whole.

“I can’t afford to see Congress play the usual political games.”

Good for him. I believe at the other end of this national crisis we should hopefully find ourselves with universal healthcare, an economy headed north and a political system that finds the old way of politics disgraceful. What a pleasure it is to have someone in office who actually gives a damn about the honesty of our system. Clinton worked within it, accepting it. Bush took us down it’s dark path, taking advantage of every vulnerability in the system, destroying what little confidence we had in government post-Nixon and creating a cynicism not seen since that time.

I raise my glass in hopes that the republicans of old find themselves in the wilderness long enough for them to starve an ideological death there and, hopefully, be reborn into the kind of party that doesn’t see government as a means to their own enrichment.

Politics Obama press conference, republican lies, Richard Shelby, stimulus, stimulus pork

“The bill was written because Nancy Pelosi said she won,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a centrist on many issues who joined conservatives in knocking the legislation. “Well, I don’t know if President Obama would agree that it was her winning, or him, but I know that attitude is really not the way to solve America’s problems - something this big.”

Pelosi made clear her displeasure with conservative Democrats who broke ranks and tartly noted that Republican-inspired business tax cuts that she did not favor were included in the bill. She said it must and will pass by the mid-February deadline Democrats have set.

“I can’t even think in terms of it failing on the Senate side,” she said. “They have to pass their bill.”

While I don’t expect Obama to be involved in the selection of every detail of this stimulus bill, I guess I did expect a little more involvement than we got. Once again, we’re looking at a democratic party that JUST DOESN’T GET IT! They’ve had 6 years in the wilderness. You would think they would have smart proposals galore and would be chomping at the bit to do something right.

Instead, we get the same small group of people making the same stupid mistakes and proposing the same stupid proposals that keep them constantly on the wrong side of right.

The republican proposal for a $15,000 tax credit is a smart one (who knew they had it in them?), but the democrats have a chip on their shoulder after this election and believe that it is the will of the people to push through THEIR tired agenda when the economy is tettering and people’s livelihoods are at stake. The hubris is astounding.

As far as the republicans blaming Pelosi - well, the blame game is tired. We’ve had enough of that, and it makes all involved look like little children (as I’ve mentioned before, Boehner already is). But Pelosi is a cog in the wheel. This political hound of a woman cannot see through her small self-serving window to find the need to cooperate. It will not make her look weak. In fact, quite the opposite.

I do understand the want of putting the republicans in their place. They have been nasty and aggressive for many years without a kind word to say about their opposition. But it is not Pelosi’s place to say “I won.” She didn’t. What Obama stood for “won” - and that movement is diametrically opposed to her way of politicking.

When are these people going to start acting like adults and do our business? Can they really be that clueless?

Politics $15, 000 tax incentive, pelosi, republicans, stimulus