Now that he has garnered more media attention for himself with his recent antics, the mysterious disapperance, the fake "mountain hike", the tearful revealation of his adultery, Gov. Mark Sanford has focused our minds on his legacy to South Carolina, and to the American people.
For years Sanford has claimed that he is a "true Conservative". He has powerful convictions, exemplified by his statement "What I believe I truly believe. I can't do the flavor-of-the-month approach." Sanford believed government should be small, spend little, even if that means allowing the poor and their children to suffer. Even if that means turning down 700 Million dollars in federal stimulus money for his state because he is afraid of "creeping Socialism". Even if that means rejecting money that could rebuild crumbling schools, forcing teenage girls to take him to court to make him take stimulus funds by court order.
Sanford has been true to conservative ideology. Let the schools fall to pieces, let the unemployed and their children starve, just as long as the brave and heroic individualists like Sanford can hold onto their low tax rates for the wealthy, no matter what the cost to society. According to Sanford, taxpayers should not be burdened with helping the sick, the poor, or the jobless.
But when it comes to using taxpayer dollars to finance a trip to Argentina to have sex with your mistress, that is a perfectly justified use of public funds. Helping those in need is socialism. Helping yourself to the contents of taxpayer wallets in order to fly to another hemisphere to indulge in illicit sex while pretending you are in a "Governor's Conference" is good, old fashioned conservatism.
Mark Sanford is not an isolated example of Conservative hypocrisy. He is the rule. The belief that everyone in America can go to hell as long as you as an individual have everything, and can indulge your every whim, is commonplace among the "Conservative movement". Public needs and civic duties, service to others, is all just evil socialism. But taking armfuls of cash from the public coffers to jet around the world and leap into the warm bed of a starstruck groupie is Republican conservatism at its finest.
Over the past week the filth has intensified from the Conservative movement. First, after years of badgering from Bill O'Reilly and others, a psycho finally follows their lead and slays Doctor Tiller during a church service.
Next, Alan Keyes vice Presidential running mate Wiley Drake publically prays for the death of President Obama. In reference to Doctor Tiller, Drake claims that God has answered his prayers for the death of Doctor Tiller and he hopes the President is next.
Then to show they are equally irresponsible and also praying for death, the republicans in the house and Senate join in. Minority leader John Boehner screeches, "President Obama is importing terrorists into the United States!!" Many other republicans join in agreement.
The point of stirring up this kind of hysteria is to create a climate of hatred and violence which will lead to more politically motivated killings.
This is the sewer that Conservatives have sunk to. They have over the last 8 years destroyed our economy, wiped out Millions of jobs, killed thousands senselessly in Iraq, and allowed 3000 to die on 9/11. They have no ideas for governing the country, in fact they never did. The only thing left is to pray that some sort of monstrous "god" will kill our President and return the republicans to power in the next election.
I thank God, the true God of love and compassion, that our President is being protected by the best security ever devised by man, and despite their racist hatred and prayers to a false god of hate to kill him, our President will live to a ripe old age, untouched by their sickening, murderous bile.
It seems the Rev. Wiley Drake, a well-known media hound, has recently been lurking on Fox News Radio, adding more than just AU Executive Director Barry W. Lynn & Co. to his death wish list.
The Rev. Wiley Drake is on the warpath again — and this time, he has really gone too far.
As you may recall, Drake is the pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif. He urged supporters to offer “imprecatory prayers” (curses) against Americans United and specific staff members in August 2007.
It seems Drake, a well-known media hound, has recently been lurking on Fox News Radio, adding more than just AU Executive Director Barry W. Lynn & Co. to his death wish list.
Before appearing on Alan Colmes’ radio show June 2, Drake had issued a statement that his imprecatory prayers for the death of slain Kansas Dr. George Tiller had been answered. He said that he “absolutely” believed that God wanted Dr. Tiller dead.
But Drake announced on Fox News Radio something that even Colmes could not wrap his head around. Apparently, in addition to AU’s Lynn and Dr. Tiller, Drake has been praying for the death of – wait for it –President Barack Obama!
“So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?” host Colmes asked in disbelief.
“Yes,” Drake responded.
Drake said he didn’t fear that these statements would maybe place him on a Secret Service or FBI watch list.
“I think it’s appropriate to pray the Word of God,” Drake said. “I’m not saying anything. What I am doing is repeating what God is saying, and if that puts me on somebody’s list, then I’ll just have to be on their list.”
Later, still stunned, Colmes restated the question, “You would like the president of the United States to die?”
Answered Drake, “If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.”
It was one thing (though still wrong) for Drake to lash out Americans United back in 2007. After all, he was angry that AU reported his church to the IRS for partisan electioneering. We alleged that Drake violated the law by using church resources to endorse Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
But it’s a completely different story to wish for the death of the president of the United States. It’s just plain evil, and it serves as another example of the fanatical thinking of some members of the Religious Right.
“This whole concept that we’re always to pray little, nice, soft, fluffy prayers – that we’re not to pray imprecatory prayer – has been something that just, in all honesty, that Southern Baptists have lost, and we need to regain imprecatory prayer,” Drake said.
“It is in the Bible,” Drake continued, “and we are proud to say as Southern Baptists that we believe the Book. You’ve got to believe the whole Book, brother, or you don’t believe any of it.”
But it’s important to note that while Drake’s statements are scary and outrageous, not all Southern Baptists agree with him.
The Rev. Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, personally denounced Drake’s comments and said he would ask Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt to do the same.
“They need to be repudiated by Southern Baptist leaders,” said McKissic, former president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention pastors’ conference and speaker at the group’s evangelism conference.
McKissic said Drake’s views “are in the same ballpark” as Rush Limbaugh saying he hopes that President Obama’s administration will fail.
“Southern Baptists,” he said, “don’t need to line up with the Rush Limbaughs and Wiley Drakes in attacking Barack Obama.”
By Sandhya Bathija
In spite of all the rants coming from extremists on the right, the same people who tried and failed to bring down President Obama last year with false accusations that he was a 'racist', Judge Sotomayor is going to be on the Supreme Court. There is nothing that Senate Republicans can do to stop her.
She is incredibly well qualified. She has both brilliance and common sense. Hearing her talk on C-Span last week helped me to see that she speaks with a quiet confidence that comes from knowing exactly what she is talking about at all times, just like President Obama.
I am extremely pleased with this pick, and forever grateful to the President for making this beautiful choice.
The former VP "Dick" Cheney keeps repeating the same tired refrain, as if he is stuttering badly from drunkeness, that he "kept the country safe" by using torture. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Upon taking office, George W Bush and Dick Cheney were warned by the CIA and Clinton intelligence officials about the dire threat from Bin Laden and Al Queda. Bush and Cheney paid no attention to the warnings. In the spring of 2001, Condolezza Rice, the new National Security Advisor appointed by W Bush, published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in which she stated that the threat from terrorists was overblown, a relic from a paranoid Clinton administration which was trying to divert attention away from scandals. The real threat to America came from Russia and China.
Over the summer of 2001, numerous American intelligence agencies were reporting alarming amounts of "chatter" being intercepted over the internet and telephone indicating a huge attack on America was coming. The NSA, CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence all were warning of an imminent attack. In August, W Bush, Cheney, and other top officials were given a Daily Briefing titled, "Bin Laden determined to attack the U.S." W Bush, and most importantly, Dick Cheney, did NOTHING, in spite of the seriousness of the warnings.
On September 11th, 2001, the most horrific terrorist attack ever by foreign nationals was perpetrated against the American people. Almost 3000 innocent Americans lost their lives. In spite of repeated warnings from multiple sources, W and Cheney did NOTHING to stop the attack.
Now, after this failure to protect America from the worst terrorist attack ever, Dick Cheney has the gall to claim that he kept America safe through torture. How is allowing 3000 people to die after you were warned for almost 9 months straight, "keeping us safe"???
Bush and Cheney were the most incompetent Pres and V. Pres we have ever had. They did NOT keep us safe from anything. Look again at the twin towers collapsing on video. I ASK ONCE MORE, HOW IS ALLOWING THAT HORRIFIC ACT OF MASS MURDER, "KEEPING US SAFE"?????
Since seeing his party booted from power in November, Dick Cheney has been plagueing Americans with his repulsive grimaces and outrageous lies almost every day in speeches and interviews on T.V. The gist of his ramblings are that he is a profoundly courageous mastermind who used torture sparingly but to great effect, saving us from the horror of dozens of September 11ths.
But every time memos are released, the opposite turns out to be true. No major attacks were averted. Certainly none that could even remotely compare to 9/11. Recent testimony from CIA officials suggest that torture was used on Abu Zabaydeh and Khalid Sheik Mohammed to establish a link between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein, NOT to uncover terrorist plots.
So, let's get this straight. The real reason for torturing these men was NOT, as Cheney has been saying, to uncover terror plots, but to cover his own behind by trying, after the fact, to link the Iraq War with 9/11. This was the real reason for the torture, NOT to protect America, but to justify the illegal and immoral Iraq War.
Cheney has made a career of cowardice. A few highlights:
1. Received 5 seperate deferments to stay out of Vietnam. To Cheney, only poor and minority kids should fight the wars his kind start.
2. Served in the criminal Nixon administration. His only lesson learned? The executive branch should have even more power, and be less transparent.
3. For 25 years played the revolving door game between government and the private sector, approving lucrative contracts, then going to work for the same company, culminating in his lobbying efforts as Vice President to award Billions in no-bid contracts to his former company, Halliburton.
4. While President of Halliburton in the 90's, raped the taxpayers by helping Halliburton to relocate its headquarters offshore to save Millions in taxes. Again, only ordinary Americans should pay taxes, not Gods of War like Cheney and Halliburton.
5. Cheney's now tax cheating company Halliburton, has been forced to repay Millions of dollars in fines by the Pentagon for scores of scams and fraudulent overcharges in Iraq. It is not enough to profit from the blood of our soldiers, Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellog, Brown, and Root also delight in breaking the law and commiting acts of fraud so outrageous they are easily discovered by the normally blind Pentagon auditors.
The record is clear. This vicious loudmouth Cheney who has the audacity to criticize President Obama has never done a thing for his country but bring it down, or rip it off. He has lined his own pockets with Millions of dollars in blood money. While VP his greed and lies sent our troops to die in an unnecessary War, and his behind the scenes fraud and deception led to convincing a puppet President Bush to make torture the official policy of the United States, going against every moral and ethical standard we have ever believed in.
We can only hope that before he leaves the earth, this sickening coward will pay for his lies which resulted in the deaths of so many thousands of innocent Americans.
This great football player who beats on women as well as opposing players decided he would sit out a visit to the White House. Is he too busy doing steroids to take a moment to go to DC and be honored by President Obama? Has his brain been dented in too many times for him to understand the significance of being invited to the nation's capital?
What kind of ignorant jack-ass is this guy? But we shouldn't be surprised. He thinks beating his girlfriend is fine and dandy, so of course he would object to doing anything positive and meaningful.
The chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, yesterday made clear the Republican Party is going to go on the attack against the Gay community (B,L,G,T). Steele said that a winning talking point for conservatives is to claim that gay marriage costs straights money and jobs. Steele said that the proper response to any gay couple that gets married from a straight person should be, "Hey! You're costing me money!"
Healthcare and other benefits provided to gay spouses will come out of the pockets of straights. This is the hateful, and stupid, "Master strategy" to lead Republicans out of the wilderness. Incite hatred against gays, with the customary violence and murders which always accompany "gay bashing", and ride on a wave of intolerance and bloodshed all the way to victory at the polls.
It does not matter that Steele's "policy statement" is a complete lie. Anyone who works for a company deserves benefits for themselves and their spouse, regardless of their sexual orientation. The work done by gays is just as valuable as work done by straights. You should not be discriminated against, or receive lesser benefits, just because you are gay.
Steele is engaging in the same kind of despicable hate mongering we have witnessed before in history. Jews caused the Depression and must be exterminated. Blacks will take jobs away from whites if we dismantle Jim Crow. Now the Republicans are saying "the gays" will cost us money and take away our jobs. We have heard this filth before.
Even going beyond the obvious racism and greed of Rush and Hannity, this new emphasis on a pogrom against gays is so disgusting and cowardly that it merits prosecution. Hate speech is deadly, and if anyone gets hurt as a result of this sewage spewing out of Michael Steele's mouth he should be put in prison.
Remember the Rule of Law? In the late 1990s, it was all the rage in conservative circles. Having maneuvered Bill Clinton into a position where he could either lie under oath or suffer massive personal and political embarrassment, conservatives reasoned that Clinton must be held accountable for perjury or the basic underpinnings of democracy would be shattered. The Republican sensibility was best reflected by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which not only crusaded for impeachment but demanded, in 2001, that Bill Clinton be indicted even after leaving office. The Journal rejected the logic of promoting healing and insisted that a post-presidency indictment would uphold "the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law".
Over the last decade, though, the right's thinking on this question has evolved. Today, the administration malfeasance consists of illegal torture, a crime I'd argue is no less serious than lying under oath about fellatio. Yet Republicans now believe that the Rule of Law is not only consistent with letting administration crimes go unpunished but actually requires it. To prosecute the departed administration would make us (to use their new catchphrase) a "banana republic"--the premise being that banana republics are defined not by their use of torture but by their overly zealous enforcement of anti-torture laws.
The GOP line is once again reflected by the Journal editorial page, which now thunders against "a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements." The editorial notably fails to even address the question of whether the previous administration complied with the law, which is apparently no longer an important element of the Rule of Law.
The right's newfound outrage is a more hysterical manifestation of the mainstream sentiment that it would be an unseemly form of vengeance or "looking backward" to hold the previous administration legally accountable for torture. It's a bizarre sentiment. The prosecution of any crime is inherently backward-looking. We prosecute law-breakers to keep them or others from breaking the law.
Now, exceptions can be made, and the question of whom to prosecute is tricky. It seems unfair to prosecute CIA agents who tortured, as they had been specifically advised that techniques like waterboarding were legal. It's likewise tricky to prosecute the Bush administration lawyers who wrote torture-authorizing memos. Administration defenders assert that those lawyers were "acting in good faith." And, yes, they were making a good-faith effort to stop terrorism, but to suggest that they were making a good-faith effort to interpret the law insults their intelligence and ours. A recent Washington Post story leaves the impression that torture-memo author Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, realized the tendentiousness of his memos, which said waterboarding isn't torture (and therefore is legal) because it does not inflict "severe physical or mental pain or suffering".
The best defense against holding Bush officials accountable for torture is that September 11 freaked out the entire country and that we can't judge their actions by the standards of how they look "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009," as Obama's intelligence director puts it. This argument would carry more weight if Republicans had changed their thinking on torture and could be expected to follow the law the next time they won the presidency. Alas, they show little sign of intellectual progress.
Even after the release of the torture memos, Republicans persist in denying that techniques like waterboarding or chaining a prisoner in a standing position for hours constitute torture. The most common defense of waterboarding is that we subjected our own soldiers to it. That's true--as a way of training them to withstand enemy torture. When you reverse engineer a torture-resistance program, you're almost by definition engaging in torture.
In reality, Bush's waterboarding methods did differ from the U.S. military's torture-resistance training, in that our soldiers knew how far we'd go and could stop the exercise if they couldn't bear it. Conservatives have inadvertently confirmed this point. Numerous Republicans object that the release of the torture memos will render waterboarding and other techniques useless--"terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them," complain former Bush officials Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey.
It's true. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, or torture methods devised thereby. Our chief weapon is surprise. (Surprise and fear. ... Amongst our weaponry are such elements as surprise and fear, as Michael Palin might put it.) That's exactly why training soldiers to withstand waterboarding is different than actually waterboarding.
The worst part is that conservatives continue to view torture through the stylized prism of the Fox drama "24." They discuss the practice as if the subjects are always terrorists, the interrogators always know just what information to ask for, and the answer can prevent imminent destruction. All of these premises are shaky.
First, there's no such thing as a government policy of "torturing terrorists. " There's only a policy of torturing people the government thinks are terrorists. Many of the suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, subjected to agonizing stress positions, turned out not to be terrorists--not because the soldiers who captured them were venal, but because they were human.
Second, torture is designed to force prisoners to provide an answer the interrogator already knows. The torturer relents when his subject provides the "correct" answer. Intelligence gathering, by contrast, is designed to garner answers the interrogator does not already know.
Finally, yes, we can imagine ticking-time-bomb situations where regular interrogation methods work too slowly and extreme measures might prove helpful. But this premise bears the same relationship to the question of legalizing torture as the morality of stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family does to the question of legalizing theft.
It's worth thinking about how likely the ticking-time-bomb scenario is to occur, and how our military and intelligence apparatus can be legally structured to account for it. But, first, Republicans are going to have to be disabused of their dramatic fantasies and reminded that a long war needs to be guided by the rule of law.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor of The New Republic
Torture is evil. It is something I had thought my whole life practiced only by dictatorships and failed states. Then came the illegitimate regime of W/Cheney and we became a country with an official policy of torturing prisoners. There are indications from leaks coming out that one torture victim, Abu Zabaydeh, gave good information leading to the capture of Sheik Khalid Mohammed when he was questioned legally without torture. After this, he was waterboarded over 80 times. Nothing of any value was gained from his torture. He cooperated initially, but stopped cooperating after the torture started.
President Obama has reviewed the secret documents Cheney said would prove torture produced some results. Our President says the information could have been gained by legal means instead of torture. That is why he has banned the use of torture now. His first instinct is that it is illegal and immoral, which is true. His second reaction, after reviewing the practice, is that it is not only evil, it also is not effective.
The reason W, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the 6 torture lawyers and others advocated torture is that they knew nothing about interrogating prisoners, and nothing about collecting intelligence in the first place. The CIA did not ask for permission to torture prisoners, the policy was forced upon them from the top. Cheney and others told interrogators who resisted that Americans would die if they did not follow orders and abuse prisoners. These disgusting men who were fans of torture because of movies and T.V. shows were in control, and the men and women who serve their country as soldiers and CIA operatives were forced to comply, or risk disciplinary measures that would result in the loss of their jobs, and their futures being ruined. A dishonorable discharge from the military for insubordination was the implied threat. Numerous documentaries, segments on 60 Minutes, and testimony before Congress by Iraq Veterans Against the War have confirmed this.
President Obama is correct to ban the practice, as he promised during the campaign. Now it is time for the top law enforcement officer in the land, Attorney General Eric Holder, to do what is his responsibility to do, investigate and prosecute the authors of the policy.
Bob Herbert
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
It’s not a party; it’s a cult. I’m no fan of Arlen Specter, but if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be shoving him out the door and waving good riddance. This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.
It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.
Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire economy.
Trickle down. Weapons of mass destruction. Torture. Deregulation. You name it. The Republican-conservative know-it-alls of the past several years (all-too-frequently with feckless Democrats following closely behind) brought destruction and heartbreak to just about everything they touched.
And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.
It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.
When it came to looking out for the interests of ordinary working Americans, the party of just-say-no could hardly have cared less. Referring to the catastrophic ordeal of Detroit’s automakers, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, told us last November, “The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their problem.”
And Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top financial adviser during the presidential campaign, was enshrined in the foot-in-mouth hall of fame last summer when he said the country was experiencing “a mental recession.”
After awhile, it became all but impossible to overlook the madness of these true believers and the incalculable damage they had done to the country. Voters who hadn’t sipped from the Kool-Aid themselves couldn’t help but recognize that the G.O.P. was bizarrely detached from the real world.
It still is. In the place of constructive alternatives to Obama administration policies, it has offered increasingly hysterical rhetoric. Mr. Gingrich warned on television that the Democrats’ moves to stem the banking crisis “gives them the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship.”
Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, described President Obama as “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” And Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate, said of the administration’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
This is not a party that can be trusted with the leadership of the country. John McCain was ready to have Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and reportedly wanted Phil Gramm to be his Treasury secretary. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has the strategic sense and attention span that you’d expect to find in a frat house on Saturday night.
“I love the Oscars,” he told GQ. “I’m looking for who’s got what dress on, you know?”
All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.
Many Liberals and Obama supporters have expressed disappointment and even anger over President Obama's recent positions on Government secrecy. Should we as Obama supporters condemn the President for not being more forthcoming on this matter?
To answer this question we must look at the totality of the problems the President is having with the executive branch, and the CIA in particular.
Last week it came to public knowledge that former VP Dick Cheney has infested the Pentagon, CIA, and other government agencies with his own spies or partisans who regularly report back to him on what is going on, and what the Obama administration plans to do.
For months the CIA has been crippled by operatives and supervisors who are more concerned with hiring attorneys to defend themselves against torture lawsuits than with actually protecting the country. The release of Al Queda recruitment videotapes and videos with young Americans who have joined Al Queda bragging about how cool it is to be in the group and carrying out raids against Ethiopian troops shows that not only did Bush and Cheney not make us safe, but that Al Queda is apparently having success in recruiting not Afgans or Pakistani citizens, but our college aged kids.
Since protecting the country is his number one priority, and because it is obvious that because of the incompetence of Bush and Cheney we are less safe than ever, I believe President Obama is going slow on transparency in the intelligence agencies. He needs elbow room to do 3 things:
1. Reassure CIA workers that they should do their jobs and protect the country instead of wasting time on talking to attorneys and even obscuring or destroying evidence and records.
2. Spend the time and effort necessary to do counter intelligence to ferret out Cheney moles and spies.
3. Decide after a major cleanup of the executive branch how to draft a completely new policy on secrecy and transparency for the government in general, and the intelligence community in particular.
This is why the President has decided to do what he is doing. Refocus on threats to America first, and put his review of the "secrecy issue" on the backburner for now.
Personally, I trust President Obama's judgment and still support him because the mess he has inherited gets worse every day, and he needs our patience if he is going to be successful in protecting us, and restoring our dysfunctional government.
I understand your rage, but every problem we face did not start on January 20th, and if only President Obama had done a better job the last six weeks everyone would have a good paying job and the environment would be squeaky clean and CEO's would make 10 dollars an hour. BANKING-Banks and the CEO pay are a mess but it didn't start with President Obama and Tim Geithner. Powerful bankers have been disrupting the country from its very founding. President Andrew Jackson engaged in warfare with the Bank of the United States which was threatening to destabilize the economy by forcing the government to pay back all loans and bonds. It is what bankers do, they like to try to run the government against the will of the people and the President. It is going to take YEARS of reform and political battles to clean up the banking system with reform and re-regulation after Republicans have been slowly undermining it for 70 years since Roosevelt first imposed law and order on the system.STIMULUS BILL--Originally the Obama team wanted it to be as high as 1.5 Trillion dollars with little or no tax cuts. Negotiating with Republicans and conservative Democrats brought it down to 787 Billion with almost half of that thrown away on tax cuts. The President tried to do the right thing, but he cannot pass laws without consent of Congress. Unless he becomes a dictator and no longer deals with a legislature there is no way he can get everything he wants.
ELECTRIC CARS--If all 300 Million Americans bought an electric car tonight and started using it tomorrow, yes the electric grid would be overwhelmed. But there are not many electric only cars on the market, I'm not aware of even one sold in the U.S. by a major manufacturer. By the time car companies start selling electric only vehicles, and the public starts buying them en masse, we will have a new, smart, electric grid which will be supplied by something other than coal. President Obama is providing the seed money for the transformation that will take at least 10 years if not more. It is not going to occur tomorrow and shut down the grid while choking us to death with coal dust.
CAP AND TRADE--Cap and trade, as it is being practiced in Europe, is working. It is less expensive for companies to just refit power plants to pollute less than for them to try to buy pollution credits from other, cleaner companies. Also cap and trade encourages utility companies to build power plants with green power instead of building a new coal plant. The utilities are going to spend several Trillion dollars in the next decade on the electric grid and new power plants, cap and trade would send them in the opposite direction of coal.
The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) co-authored by our Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, will give every American the option of forming a Union at his workplace. This will reverse the process of all economic growth and prosperity going exclusively to the top 1% of bosses and CEOs that we have witnessed the past 30 years.
As the ecomomic writer Ezra Klein has noted,
"Unions do not change economic growth, or at least there's littleconvincing evidence that they do. The countries with the world'shighest growth rates -- the Nordic economies -- also have some of theworld's highest rates of unionization. Denmark, Sweden, and Finland allapproach 80 percent. Rather, unions change the distributionof economic growth. They direct more of it to the middle class and lessof it to the executive class.
It is time we ignore the false claims of the Republican Party that Unions are not good for the country and should be eliminated. The recent attempts by Republicans to destroy the UAW and throw an additional 3 Million workers out of their jobs while at the same time giving Billions of dollars in aid and tax credits to Foreign automakers in Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Kentucky has been exposed, and shows that in their hatred directed against American workers, the Republicans are not only anti-Union, but anti-American.
The time has come for us to buy American, to support each other by strengthening each other's ability to organize against the CEO's, and to make America strong again by passing the Employee Free Choice Act. With Labor reform like this and a great President who cares about working people, we can get out of this financial crisis and provide a secure future for our children.
After 8 years of the Republican President's Tax cuts for the rich, which W claimed would bring prosperity and economic growth to all, more Americans are now on food stamps than at any time in history.
30 Million of us are now sinking deeper into poverty, and also today the new unemployment numbers came out with 750,000 out of work just in March.
Yet the Republicans are still recommending W's policies in their budget proposal, more tax cuts for the rich, a spending freeze on everything but defence, and a 1.7 Trillion dollar deficit to boot, the worst of all possible worlds.
Thankfully, it looks like President Obama's budget will pass after all, giving us hope that we will be able to turn this nightmare around that Bush and Cheney have left behind.
President W shipped off our troops to die in Iraq for no justifiable reason, made Torture the official policy of our government, wasted 5 Trillion dollars in debt with nothing to show for it, and increased the disparity between the rich and poor while at the same time neglecting to do any oversight or regulation of the Wall Street criminals who have wrecked our economy.
What President in history has done more damage than this?
This is from a speech Brother Chavez gave in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraging us to sacrifice in the cause of social justice.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
My friends, Dr. King realized that the only real wealth comes from helping others.
I challenge each and every one of you to be a true disciple of Dr. King, to be truly wealthy.
I challenge you to carry on his work by volunteering to work for a just cause you believe in.
Consider joining our movement because the farm workers, and so many other oppressed peoples, depend upon the unselfish dedication of its volunteers, people just like you.
Thousands of people have worked for our cause and have gone on to achieve success in many different fields.
Our non-violent cause will give you skills that will last a lifetime. When Dr. King sounded the call for justice, the freedom riders answered the call in droves. I am giving you the same opportunity to join the same cause, to free your fellow human beings from the yoke of oppression.
I have faith that in this audience there are men and women with the same courage and the same idealism, that put young Martin Luther King, Jr. on the path to social change.
I challenge you to join the struggle of the United Farm Workers. And if you don't join our cause, then seek out the many organizations seeking peaceful social change.
Seek out the many outstanding leaders who will speak to you this week, and make a difference.
If we fail to learn that each and every person can make a difference, then we will have betrayed Dr. King's life's work. The reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had more than just a dream, he had the love and the faith to act.
God Bless You.
Source: Cesar E. Chavez, January 12, 1990.
