Sen. Bernie Sanders' Guide to Corporate Freeloaders

Thanks to Moveon.org.

Jesus Does Standup

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Liberty University, a federally funded institution!

Several articles around the net have noted that while Jerry Falwell is dead via a heart attack from God, his nasty legacy lives on in the form of an ultra-fundamentalist christianist "university" named Liberty, located in Lynchburg, Virginia, now being run by his son, Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr.

And would you believe it is the "largest," the "biggest," the "fastest-growing" christianist school in the world?  Well, it is.  With the help of U.S. government money!

Hypocrisy abounds in the christianist fundamentalist world, which was one of the things the fabled Yeshua of the Gospels was said to despise, which makes it even more fun to point out and laugh at in the 21st century.  Falwell had little use for our Constitution or our government, as does his son, yet they reach out with their greedy little paws to grasp taxpayer dollars to keep their miserable enterprise afloat.

If you read Liberty's promo material on the Net, one would think they are the cat's meow, so to speak.  One would think that since day one in 1971 Liberty "university" has been a financial wunderkind!  One would think that people all over the world, infected with the Liberty virus, have consistently donated monies to keep the "university" in the black so it could continue to train mindless and ignorant christianists to go out in the world and proclaim the same nonsense they were taught, like, for example, that there is a god who created everything that exists in six days because the Bible says so and every little thing in the Bible is the word of god to be taken literally and without question.  And if one has a problem understanding something in the Bible, like, say, why god ordered parents to stone their children to death for not observing the Sabbath, they should consult with their spiritual advisors to get the "truth" as to the meaning of the passage.

Unfortunately, the truth is different.  Liberty "university" has had financial problems for years.  Evidently people don't donate as much money as is needed to keep the operation afloat.  In fact, according to Time magazine, Liberty has been "between $20 million and $25 million in debt until this year.  But when God called Jerry Falwell home last May, it turned out that he had a $34 million insurance policy.  It was used to bail out his school."

Which raises another question:  What insurance company would be so stupid as to a give an obese fathead a $34 million insurance policy?  I dunno.  I have a hard enough time getting decent car insurance and I haven't had a wreck ever or a ticket in over 50 years!


Alex Pareene, writing at Salon. com, notes that Liberty "university" "received $445 million in federal financial aid last year.  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government."

The federal money was for Pell grants.  "The school is the No. 1 recipient of Pell grant money in the state of Virginia."  So the money went to students to pay for "tuition, room and board and other expenses."  That makes it justifiable in the eyes of Liberty officials.

But why do the christianist Repugnicans in Congress, and all the teapot crackpots want to defund NPR and Planned Parenthood, both of which provide a real service which is available to all Americans, and not defund a right-wing, christianist fundamentalist school that teaches nonsense about the Bible, science and history?

What has happened, of course, is that the aforementioned representatives in our Congress do not understand nor do they care about the values that undergird and protect freedom in this country.  They are driven, not by what might benefit the American people or by a sense of commonality or even by common sense, but by a religious and racial agenda that fuels meanness and hatred!  Thus, they go after the weak and the powerless for they are the most vulnerable among us.  And in that way they repay the corporations who own them body and soul and without whose resources they would not have been elected.


The funding of Liberty "university" by the federal government is symbolic of one of the things very wrong in our country.  On Liberty's part, it is hypocrisy in spades.  It makes the "christianity" promoted by Liberty laughable.

You will note I've consistently not capitalized the word, "university," in this diatribe.  Liberty does not deserve to be called by that name.  It is not a university in any sense.  It is a mill that churns out christianist clones.

Please read Mr. Pareene's article here.

Easter - the other meaning

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons!

The crucifixion that never happened and the nails that never were

The following is based on an article by Linda Gradstein at AOL News.

He's a journalist who makes documentary movies, this Simcha Jacobovici. His latest effort, "The Nails of the Cross," pretends it is possible that Jacobovici has found two the of nails that were used in the crucifixion of Jesus.

Please laugh heartily and loudly.

Unfortunately, many ignorant folks and others who are deliberately moronic will believe this journalist who makes documentaries. But they should not.

Here's the background: Twenty one years ago or so, archaeologists in Israel claimed to have found the tomb of Caiaphas. One Caiaphas, according to the Gospel tradition, was a high priest involved in Jesus' crucifixion.

Jacobovici located two nails at Tel Aviv University. He asserts these nails were found in the aforementioned tomb. But he has no proof this is so.

Now, Jacobovici is not stupid, so he doesn't say definitively these are the nails used to crucify Jesus. Just that such a scenario is "possible."

Okay, continue laughing. But Jacobovici will probably make a bundle on this pretend "documentary" about nails.


There are numerous problems with this story. First of all, scholars are generally agreed that at the time Jesus supposedly lived, the Romans did not normally nail people to a cross. That would be futile as the weight of the body would cause it to slide down the upright portion of the cross, ripping the hands or wrists free of the nails and foiling death, if only temporarily. But it would be a mess trying to nail the person back on the cross! The Romans crucified people by tying them to the cross with straps. As their bodies fell victim to gravity, their hands held and they slowly suffocated to death. This could take several hours, or longer.

Now, that in itself pretty much blows Jacobovici's theory out of the water!

Secondly, there is no evidence that these nails came from the tomb of this Caiaphas. And even if there were such evidence, there is nothing to indicate this Caiaphas was the high priest at the time of Jesus' supposed crucifixion.

Thirdly, assuming the story is true (which it isn't), the Jews of the time did NOT crucify Jesus! It is inconceivable that the high priest would have someone seek out and bring him the nails used in the crucifixion of a minor criminal, a nuisance but not really a threat to the Jewish establishment. Furthermore, the Jewish method of capital punishment was stoning. If the high priest had ordered Jesus killed, the temple minions would have stoned him to death!

Crucifixion was the method used by the Romans! Furthermore, we know the Romans crucified thousands of Jews. During the seige of Jerusalem (c. 70 CE), as many as 1200 Jews were crucified on a daily basis. One would expect to find the land littered with nails, in and out of tombs, if in fact, the Romans nailed people to crosses! Leather straps would, of course, have rotted away long ago.


Unfortunately for Jacobovici, the entire story of Jesus and his crucifixion is a fabrication, created from a single story and then elaborated upon by several different writers in the late 1st century and early 2nd century (in order to put flesh and bones on Paul's heavenly "Christ," the one spoken of in the prelude to the Gospel of John as the Word, or God himself).

The crucifixion is one aspect of that overall story. What we can say about the crucifixion of Yeshua (Jesus) is that it never happened. There is absolutely no evidence in any record found anywhere in the world for such a thing to have occurred. And because the Romans kept meticulous records of the ordering of their empire, such a crucifixion would have been noted somewhere, especially in light of the fact that Pontius Pilate (the Roman procurator in Palestine) was under suspicion and being observed carefully by his superiors in Rome at the time the crucifixion is set in history.


Maybe Mr. Jacobovici should make "documentaries" about George Washington never telling a lie or chopping down a cherry tree, or better yet, how our founding fathers were rabid evangelical Christians!


Oh yes: Happy Easter!

A President's Prayer

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

We can't afford anything but war in the good ol' US of A

[Image from here.]

Social Security is in trouble "they" tell us. It isn't, but "they" (meaning Repugnicans, mostly) lie as a matter of course. Repugs also call Social Security an "entitlement" program which is another bald-faced lie. It is no such thing.

Medicare, these nogoodniks claim, is also in trouble. And we sure as hell can't afford decent government-sponsored health care like our politicians get. We don't have enough money for our schools, for our teachers, cops, firemen. We can't afford to fix our ailing infrastructure.

The word is out that those of us who receive Social Security should not expect a cost-of-living increase again this year. In spite of the fact that prices are rising quite rapidly...that a few groceries set me back $200 today and to fill my gas tank cost $53, the government (which supposedly is "my" government) has no money to fulfill its promises to me or "we, the people"!


But we've got enough money to wage war. We've got plenty of money to spend if it's about killing people we don't like.

And any talk about Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq having to do with our "security" has long lost its validity. It's all bullshit. We're not in any of those places because we care about the people or because we care about democracy or because we want to help the poor souls who live under Middle Eastern or any other dictators.

If any of that were true, we would have attacked Saudi Arabia long before we sent in troops to destroy Iraq or to bring regime change in Afghanistan. We would have blown up Yemen and Egypt and Iran, not to mention China, Cuba, Venezuela years ago!

In fact, historically, we have cared about nothing except to ensure that our corporate overlords were able to continue to rape and plunder the earth for their own profit, whether it involve bananas or oil or anything else.


And I'm pissed. The idea of America has gone to hell.  What America is supposed to stand for is a joke!  We've got a Congress filled with rich morons (about 300 members of Congress are millionaires, and a majority of the Repugs in Congress think global warming is a hoax and evolution is false) who are wedded body and soul to the corporations that have bought and paid for them and their services!

Many of our representatives in Congress and our state legislatures believe in the legendary Jesus as their personal savior. That, they think, gives them the right to lord it over women and women's bodies. Thus, over 300 anti-abortion laws are currently in process in the various states!

And these Jesus lovers, wherever they are found, evidently see nothing wrong with murdering folks if those folks happen to live in a foreign country and follow a different religion!


But right now, at this moment, reading of our freaking stupidity in Libya, I'm angry as hell!

Pauline Jelinek in an AOL article, describes how the Pentagon has spent $550 million "extra" dollars in Libya. But this, of course, does not begin to describe the real costs. One official believes that the Libyan operation will cost us another $40 million "over the next three weeks" and then the costs will settle in at $40 million a month.

Jelinek says one "lawmaker" "... estimated last week that Libya could be a $1 billion campaign."

Hah! Anyone in their right mind knows that the military lies routinely when it comes to operations and expenditures. The likely cost will be millions more!

We've already spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan and those costs just keep on coming. And for what? And why do we give a damn about Libya?

It's oil. It's always about oil. It's always been about oil!


So don't listen to those sons-of-bitches who say the U.S. is broke; who whine about the deficit; who blithely claim we can't afford a cost of living increase for our elderly! They all lie. Big time.

If we can afford $1 billion to kill people in Libya and $1 trillion plus to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can afford a cost of living increase for our Social Security recipients!


A final observation: It doesn't occur to Repugnicans because they don't seem to have to worry about how they're going to make a mortgage payment or buy groceries, but there's something wrong in this country when many corporations pay little or no taxes on their income.

There's something hugely wrong when a company like General Electric can post a profit of $23 billion plus and pay ZERO taxes!!!!


You can read the entire article by Ms. Jelinek here.

The fair weather friend

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Maddow: It's Not About the Budge...

Rachel Maddow took a whack at the hypocritical Republicans in Wisconsin and the Republican governors across the country who will spare no expense when it comes to taking care of their own -- especially big business and their wealthy campaign donors -- and at the same time are willing to raise taxes on the poor and the middle class.
Case in point, we have Stephen Fitzgerald, the father of Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald and State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. The elder Fitzgerald, who after losing his election for Dodge County sheriff by a 2-to-1 margin, somehow got appointed as the head of the State Patrol.
And as Rachel noted, in the midst of the potential recall of a number of Wisconsin Senators, there is "another patronage scandal blossoming today."
Senator's girlfriend had help getting job:

Even though the state is supposedly broke, top officials in Gov. Scott Walker's team were able to scrape together enough money to give a state job to the woman identified as Sen. Randy Hopper's girlfriend.
Anything for a political ally.
Valerie Cass, a former Republican legislative staffer, was hired Feb. 7 as a communications specialist with the state Department of Regulation and Licensing. She is being paid $20.35 per hour. The job is considered a temporary post.
Cass previously had worked in the state Senate and for the GOP campaign consulting firm Persuasion Partners in Madison. She also was paid for campaign work for the state Republican Party and U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner before that.
"Ms. Cass' name was among many forwarded to DRL by the Governor's Transition Team as potential candidates for positions with the department," said David Carlson, the agency's spokesman. Read on...

Rachel summed this up rather nicely.

MADDOW: But apart from the awkwardness for the State Senator here, there's also the awkwardness of whether or not Wisconsin state government is so broke because of all those greedy state employees, right? I mean for the Senator already facing the likely prospect of recall, this is not a positive development. But is also really handy as a reminder about the whole nature of this fight in Wisconsin, and why it is resonating nationally.
The Republican justification for the union stripping business in Wisconsin is that it was all about the budget, right? But then something like this comes along and we're all reminded that if it were all about the budget, people hired by the state would not be getting $12,000 raises, whether or not they were State Senators' girlfriends.

She wrapped it up with letting her viewers know about some of Think Progress' Wonk Room reporting on the GOP governors out there and their willingness to raise taxes on the working class while giving their wealthy campaign donors a break -- REPORT: In 12 States, GOP Plans To Slash Corporate Taxes While Increasing Burden on Working Families:

ThinkProgress has been documenting conservative efforts to shift the burden of record budget shortfalls onto middle-class Americans, while simultaneously doling out tax cuts to corporations. While progressive governors have proposed raising revenue from those who can afford it, alongside painful cuts to programs, Republican governors have unveiled budgets that cut taxes for corporations and raise them on the middle-class and working poor. In this report, ThinkProgress evaluates the priorities conservatives have set in twelve states:

NEW JERSEY: Last year, Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) budget raised taxes on the working poor and middle-class by cutting the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit and homestead rebates — yet still found money for lucrative corporate tax cuts. This year, Christie’s budget calls for $200 million in business tax cuts, while cutting mental health services, $540 million from Medicaid, and witholding property tax rebates for seniors until public workers give up many of their health and pension benefits. Many New Jerseyans have said they prefer a tax on millionaires to Christie’s draconian cuts.
MICHIGAN: Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) budget would make Michigan’s already regressive tax system even more unfair for the state’s poorest residents. The plan cuts taxes on business by more than 86 percent while slashing $1.2 billion in funding for “schools, universities, local governments and other areas.” Snyder also wants to raise personal taxes by 30 percent — an increase that will fall disproportionately on Michigan’s lowest income residents.
GEORGIA: Last week, the Georgia House passed an austerity budget that will increase health insurance costs by more than 20 percent for state workers, teachers and retirees and cut funding for state universities by $75 million. The House has already gutted the state’s HOPE scholarship program, and is now considering implementing a regressive new tax system that would lower income taxes for the rich while raising the sales tax on basic necessities. House Majority Leader Larry O’Neal (R), meanwhile, has introduced a bill that would implement a flat income tax rate and cut corporate taxes by 33 percent.
FLORIDA: At a Tea Party rally last month, Gov. Rick Scott (R) unveiled his budget, telling supporters he would make the state the most “fiscally conservative” in the nation. The budget would slash corporate income and property taxes, lay off 6,700 state employees, cut education funding by $4.8 billion, and cut Medicaid by almost $4 billion.
OHIO: Gov. John Kasich (R) has proposed cutting 25 percent of schools’ budgets, $1 million from food banks, $12 million from children’s hospitals, and $15.9 million from an adoption program for children with special needs. A Kasich staffer revealed yesterday that these cuts are more about politics then budget-balancing, telling the Cincinnati Dispatch that “even if there weren’t an $8 billion deficit, we’d probably be proposing many of the same things.” The plan includes tax cuts for oil companies, a repeal of the estate tax and an income tax cut for the rich that former Gov. Ted Strickland (D) halted last year because of the state’s fiscal crisis.
IOWA: Gov. Tom Branstad (R) began this year proposing a budget that included a $200 million tax cut on commercial property taxes and corporate income but would freeze spending on schools, cut $42 million to state universities and lay off “hundreds” of state workers. Since then, the Governor has already begun laying off state nursing home workers and frozen funding for mental health services. The budget is now moving through the politically divided legislature, where Republican-controlled House committees have gone even further, approving tax refunds for upper-income Iowans while cancelling infrastructure investments, eliminating preschool for 4-year-olds, closing Iowa workforce development offices, and making even deeper cuts to public universities.
PENNSYLVANIA: Gov. Tom Corbett (R) presented a budget last week that would cut taxes for corporations, while freezing teacher salaries, cutting dental care for Medicaid recipients, and eliminating more than half of the state’s universities. Yet the state has lots of revenue potential in northern Pennsylvania, where out-of-state energy companies’ “fracking” of natural gas has reaped them hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. Corbett has refused to tax these companies, many of which helped fund his gubernatorial campaign, and has instead opted to lay of more than 1,500 state workers.
MAINE: Despite calling for “shared sacrifice” Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage’s (R) budget would cut income taxes for Maine’s wealthiest one percent, while actually raising property taxes for the state’s middle class. This so-called “jobs budget” freezes healthcare funding for working parents, cuts money for schools and infrastructure and raises the retirement age for public workers. Yet LePage was still able to find more than $200 million in tax cuts for large estates, business and the rich.
WISCONSIN: The tax cuts Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed earlier this year worsened his state’s fiscal condition, so now Walker is planning to raise taxes on the poor, eliminate $26 million in tax credits for seniors and single mothers and cancel property tax rebates for low-income Wisconsinites making less than $24,000 a year.
SOUTH CAROLINA: Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has proposed ending the state’s corporate income tax, even while she calls for cutting physical education, K-12 schools, and Medicaid. Haley has received pushback from Republican colleagues: last week the legislature rejected her plan to force state employees to pay more for health insurance.
KANSAS: Facing a $493 million budget shortfall, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has called for eliminating the corporate income tax while proposing a $50 million cut to education. With majorities in both Houses, Republicans have proposed a cut to the federal Earned Income Tax Credit that would push 6,500 families below the poverty line.
ARIZONA: Last October, as she ignored 26 other possible funding solutions, Gov. Jan Brewer (R) implemented painful cuts to the state’s Medicaid program, which resulted in 2 deaths and left 98 Arizonians waiting for transplant funding. After months of protests, Brewer finally agreed to set aside $151 million in an “uncompensated-care pool to pay health-care providers for ‘life-saving’ procedures, including transplants.” However, House Republicans refused to restore funding for organ transplants because, as House Appropriations Committee chair Jon Kavanagh (R) said, “not enough lives would be saved to warrant restoring millions in budget cuts.” Then, while peoples’ lives were in danger, Brewer eagerly signed tax cuts for businesses that will cost the state $538 million.

As they noted, I'm not sure how that's anyone's idea of "shared sacrifice" when the only ones being asked to sacrifice are the working class.
If anyone here is a regular reader of Think Progress' site, and you don't check into the research being done at their sister site, The Wonk Room, you''re missing a whole lot of great information that their site posts daily and that doesn't always get front paged.

[Many thanks to Crooks & Liars.  The entire article and video from here.]

You'll shoot your eyes out

We're screwed!

 It's no longer a matter of whether you view a glass as half-empty or half-full.  There's almost nothing left in the glass! We're screwed!


Item: American warplanes and warships are bombing Libya. With Obama's approval. What happened to Obama? And we're still killing people in Afghanistan. Ten years of killing. American troops remain in Iraq.

Think about Libya for a moment. Obama spoke some pastry-filled words to justify our military intervention. It's all bullshit. If we gave a damn about dictators beating up on their people we'd be intervening in most of the countries of the Middle East and a bunch more in other parts of the world. We love dictators. Always have. We'll even help them beat up on their own people so long as they do what we say and give us what we want, whether that's bananas or oil.

Obama spoke bullshit. If what he said were true we would have intervened in China a long time ago. Can you imagine any scenario where the United States would intervene in China to help the Chinese overthrow their government? Of course not. China is big and powerful.

Libya on the other hand is perceived (maybe falsely) as being small and relatively weak. Listen to our gung-ho military leaders: Libya won't be a problem; this is short-term action; Gaddafi will be gone in a few days. Hah!

If Obama's words contained even a smidgen of the truth we would have sent warplanes to bomb the Saudi king and his minions years ago. We would have bombed Yemen. We'd have invaded Egypt long before the current protestors were even born!

What happened to our president? Where's the man we elected in 2008?

President Obama is a Christian. He is like most other so-called Christians who neither believe in nor act on the most important teachings of their legendary leader: Teachings such as the admonition to not seek revenge; to turn the other cheek; to forgive 70 times 7; or that a rich person will find it impossible to recognize or share in the kingdom of God; etc.

So Christian leaders in the United States, proud of their religious heritage, continue to kill other people in the name of what - democracy? Freedom? Hah! In the name of OIL!


Item:  Moving on but sticking with Libya. Supposedly, the US of A is saddled with a huge debt, a monstrous deficit, a morass of fiscal ill-health that will doom us as a nation. If you don't believe that just listen to Republicans everywhere (and not a few Dems). Our first priority, these folks claim, is to reduce the debt. Otherwise, as said one Congresswoman the other day, we'll have no country left to leave our children and grandchildren.

Omigod! This is terrible. What shall we do? The Republicans (and not a few Dems) have an answer for that, too.  Because over 300 members of Congress are millionaires, however, it is unlikely that any of them would vote to increase the taxes of the wealthiest of our citizens or of those corporations who routinely hide their profits in off-shore banks/scams and pay no taxes whatsoever.

Republicans (and not a few Dems) cannot imagine taxing the rich. That's why they insist we must balance the budget, rid ourself of the deficit, dig us out of the hole, by burying our middle-class. [The poor are given no consideration and don't have a chance in hell of surviving!]

Thus Republicans and their minions in the media lie routinely about Social Security (which is NOT going broke by any stretch of the imagination!), Medicare, Medicaid, NPR, school lunch programs, health-care, etc., in order to justify their assault on people of lesser means than themselves!

If, however, as others have asked, we cannot fund our schools or our teachers, put enough police on our payrolls, repair our decaying infrastructure, help people be all they can be without getting killed in some godforsaken war in some godforsaken country in the middle of nowhere, how in hell can we afford another goddamn war in the Mediterranean?

Where are we getting this money? Are we borrowing from China? The Mafia? The Vatican?

I copied what follows from Crooks & Liars. It was, I believe, written by Heather:

"I guess now that we've decided we can afford to help with air strikes against another country that has a lot of oil that we might be concerned about, we can continue to tell the tax payers that we're broke and cannot afford to pay for these horrible entitlement programs that you working slugs were expecting like your Social Security and your Medicaid programs. And never mind raising taxes on the 'job creators' because their needs must be met at all times whether they're creating jobs overseas for slave wages or anywhere for that matter. If you're a corporation that does business in the United States, you must be coddled to.

"And you stinking low life union thugs must STFU if you don't like any of this, because you of course are the source of all our problems and draining the taxpayers in America of their hard earned money. And if you're a dirty f-king hippie organization like NPR, you must be defunded because we can't have our taxpayer dollars being spent on any evil liberal ideology being spread around to the rural areas of the country. ...

"Deep Thought - U.S. fires 110 tomahawk missiles, each costs $569,000. That's more than 5 years of NPR federal funding in less than an hour.  [My emphasis]

"We've got to have our priorities, don't you know."


Item:  Stupidity and ignorance reign. From The Nation: "Of the more than 40 million retirees and survivors who receive Social Security benefit payments every year, a whopping 44.1 percent responded in a government survey that they had 'not used a government social program.' For other programs, the numbers are even higher. Of the 35 million taking advantage of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, 60 percent were unaware that it is a government-sponsored program. Even programs like Pell Grants (43.1 percent), Medicaid (27.8 percent) and food stamps (25.4 percent) have high rates of misrecognition."

There's more: "In February 2009, President Obama passed tax credits worth $288 billion. But a year later, only 12 percent of those polled believed theyr were paying lower taxes."


Item: Our state governments are run by mental midgets and hateful monsters. We're all familiar with Gov. Walker of Wisconsin. Many of us are waiting with bated breath to hear that he's been recalled or indicted for his illegal action in getting his union-busting bill through the state legislature; an action which proves without a doubt that the bill had not one whit to do with the state's deficit!

And other Republican governors are trying the same thing. As stated in an AlterNet article, these governors "have proposed placing the brunt of deficit reduction onto the backs of their state's public employees, students, and middle-class taxpayers, while simultaneously trying to enact corporate tax cuts and giveaways. Govs. Rick Scott (R-FL), Tom Corbett (R-PA), and Jan Brewer (R-AZ) have all gone down this road."

But it gets even worse in Michigan! The Republican governor of that state "has proposed ending his state's Earned Income Tax Credit, cutting a $600 per child tax credit, and reducing credits for seniors, while also cutting funding for school districts by eight to ten percent. At the same time, as the Michigan League for Human Services found, the state's business taxes would be reduced by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent, under Snyder's plan."


Item: I'm not sure of the number, but many of the Republican governors in this country have jumped on a legal action intended to halt health-care reform in its tracks!

Well, guess what? Every single one of them is a major hypocrite. This from Harper's magazine: All 50 states have applied for funding under the 2010 Affordable Care Act!


Item: We're screwed. But we're not screwed as badly as the young men and women serving and getting killed and maimed in our armed forces for no good reason whatsoever. And they are well aware of that fact! It is taking a toll. Again from Harper's: Last year, 455 American soldiers died in combat. The minimum number who committed suicide was 407!


Item: We're screwed because we have legally insane people serving in our state legislatures. From The Nation: "In South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa, legislators have proposed bills that would arguably permit a pregnant woman's mate or relatives (or maybe just anyone) to murder her abortion provider to protect her fetus."

This is so beyond the pale, it's absolutely incomprehensible. But I'll betcha every legislator supporting these proposals is a follower of Jesus the Christ!


Item: From The Nation. "Bills restricting abortion are [...] underway in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Virginia, Florida, Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio."


Item: When openly-avowed Christians openly lie about whatever they wish we're screwed. Mike Huckabee, Southern Baptist preacher, speaker of trash for FAUX News and would-be prez of these United States, said recently that Obama had been raised in Kenya and thus "sympathized with the 'anticolonialism' of the Mau Mau rebellion." (Time magazine, March 21, 2011, p. 25)

Then the lying Christian preacher said that he just "meant to imply that Obama had a "'different worldview,' having been raised in Indonesia. 'Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings, and our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrasahs.'"

Well, the lying Christian preacher is not only without an ethical or moral bone is his body he's also ignorant as hell. As Time points out, "Obama was raised in neither Kenya nor Indonesia (where he did spend four years) but in Hawaii, by his Kansas Republican grandparents. He was a Boy Scout. And he didn't attend a madrasah. There are a multitude of Rotary Clubs in both Indonesia and Hawaii."

Jesus Christ! Huckabee's a scummy character!


Item: Congress extended the Patriot Act's "surveillance authorizations--which permit spying on groups and individuals and make a mockery of Fourth Amendment privacy protections." While Obama wanted a 3-year extension, Congress opted for a 3-month extension.

Republicans, as you know, crow a lot about their admiration and devotion to our Constitution. We also know, however, that is simply a lot of rhetoric. Or, as Frank Barone would say, it is "holy crap"!

When Democrats attempted a motion to make certain that surveillance would be done strictly in accordance with the Constitution, Republicans jumped to oppose it. The motion lost 234 to 186. ALL the "NO" votes came from Republicans. And one of those was none other than that lover of the Constitution, that leading light of Republican nonsense and mendacity, Michele Bachmann!


We're screwed!

The ugliest dog in town

Thanks to Atheistic Cartoons.

Glenn Beck - Yahweh's insane spokesman on earth

Disaster strikes.  Spokespersons for Yahweh, the god of the legendary Jesus, begin chanting "God hates humans!  God wreaks his punishments on humans.  Humans are bad and doing bad things and god is punishing them."

To claim to be a spokesperson for the almighty pretty much defines one as insane.  Glenn Beck, for example, is clearly insane.  He not only believes he can speak for Yahweh in matters of disaster but can also decode what god is so pissed about.

Insane people can be very coy, however; very artful, very crafty.  Beck's brain may be addled from cocaine and god knows how many other mind-bending drugs, but he can be coy, artful and crafty all at once.  Thus Glenn, the master of stupid, is capable of clever!  He thinks god may have caused the earthquake that created the tsunami that devastated Japan.  (Plate tectonics are evidently beyond Beck's area of expertise.)

Ah, but ol' crazy Beck doesn't come right out and say that.  Beck says he's "not saying God is causing earthquakes" ... but then said he's "not not saying that, either."

But ol' Beck the nutcase isn't done.  "Whether you call it Gaia, or whether you call it Jesus, there's a message being sent and that is, 'hey, you know that stuff we're doing?  Not really working out real well.'  Maybe we should stop doing some of it."

Hmmm.  Guess for Beck it doesn't matter what you call your god.  You can even call him Jesus.  How about Mohammed, Glenn?  Or Krishna?  Or Ronald Reagan?

Whatever you call him or her or it, Beck knows what he, she or it is thinking:  We humans have been bad people, flirting with liberalism, Marxism, Islamo-fascism, welfare statism, socialism, communism, among other things, and god is pissed.  So pissed he/she/it might invade the natural course of things to ram two tectonic plates together and cause a massive earthquake which would result in thousands of humans dying horrible deaths, as well as destroying homes and schools and temples and businesses and the hopes and dreams of millions of people who did not even know they were evil!

Why do you suppose this monstrous deity ala Beck chose to exercise his wrath on Japan?  Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki insufficient relative to Japan's deserved punishment?

If anything, ol' crazy Beck ought to be publicly pulling his hair because this time his crazy god overlooked the sins of the people of the United States of America.

Media Matters has provided a copy of Beck's rant.  It would be funny, except that what happened in Japan is way too far from funny, and way too many millions of people listen to Beck who entices them, using their ignorance and culpability, down into his vile pit of insanity!




More from Media Matters here.

That Explains It

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Social Security is not the reason for the deficit - now tell that to Bill Maher

What follows is from Crooks & Liars:

While I agree with Bill Maher that we do have a problem with the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and defense spending and I agree that our budget should not be balanced on the backs of the poor, what the hell is it going to take to get through to Maher that Social Security is not to blame for the deficit? It's running a surplus.

Maybe someone can send him this article by Robert Reich -- Budget baloney: Social Security isn't to blame for deficit:

Social Security won't be a problem for another 26 years, and even then, the problem can be solved.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican presidential hopeful, says in order to “save” Social Security the retirement age should be raised. The media are congratulating him for his putative “courage.” Deficit hawks are proclaiming Social Security one of the big entitlements that has to be cut in order to reduce the budget deficit.

This is all baloney.

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. (Early boomers like me can start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67.)

Greenspan’s commission must have failed to predict something. But what? It fairly accurately predicted how quickly the boomers would age. It had a pretty good idea of how fast the US economy would grow. While it underestimated how many immigrants would be coming into the United States, that’s no problem. To the contrary, most new immigrants are young and their payroll-tax contributions will far exceed what they draw from Social Security for decades.

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

It went from 90 percent to 84 percent because a larger and larger portion of total income has gone to the top. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security’s long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

Bingo.

God and the gridiron

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Ronald Reagan and the destruction of the American dream!

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. February 6 will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan. It will be celebrated by meetings and symposiums all over the world. Now joining us to give his take on Reaganomics is Michael Hudson. Michael's a former Wall Street economist, a distinguished research professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he runs a website: Michael-Hudson.com. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROF., UMKC: Thank you very much.

JAY: We are celebrating the successes and achievements of Ronald Reagan in, particularly, economics. What do you make of Reaganomics?

HUDSON: Well, obviously, it--a consequence was to quadruple the federal debt by cutting taxes. Most people think of him in terms of lowering income taxes, especially on the higher brackets. But one of the key things that people don't recognize is what he did with the small print of the tax code, especially in the 1981 tax revision as it affected real estate. He gave real estate double declining-balance, so that you could depreciate a building as if the building was wearing out, even as the property were gaining price, doubling, quadrupling, as if it were wearing out, and avoid paying any income tax at all. Not only did our real estate owners--absentee owners, that is--avoid paying income tax, but they had a tax loss carry forward while their building was soaring in price, while their rents were rising, while they were making more and more money. The tax code enabled them to pretend that the building was wearing out in just seven and a half years. And this was at a time when the most expensive buildings were prewar buildings, even hundred-year-old buildings, when buildings were built better. And so what Reagan did was make the FIRE sector--finance, insurance, and real estate--virtually tax-exempt. So it wasn't that he lowered income taxes; he abolished them. He replaced the regulatory commissions with deregulators, especially the group that was called "the crazies" out of Utah, who were put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency and other environment agencies.

JAY: But the supporters of Reagan say--they may even agree with much of what you just said. They said, well, this allowed growth in the economy, it gave rise to prosperity, regulations out of the way, lowering, even elimination of taxes. I mean, a lot of his supporters would applaud all of that and say it was a positive for the economy as a whole.

HUDSON: When people talk about the economy, what do they mean? When Reagan took office in 1979, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 29 percent of the revenue accruing to wealth. Interest, dividends, rent, and capital gains. By 2004 they'd doubled that proportion to 59 percent of the returns to wealth. So the economic growth did not accrue to labor. Labor's living standards and real wages have not increased since 1979. During all of Reagan and Bush and Clinton, their living standards didn't go up. So the economic growth was all in the overhead of the financial sector. It was all rentier growth.

JAY: Okay, but the theory is it's supposed to trickle down. So didn't it?

HUDSON: No. There was--it was sucked up. That's the important thing. Instead of trickling down, there was a huge sucking up of wealth to the top. If it trickled down, the richest 1 percent wouldn't have doubled their share of the returns to wealth. If it had trickled down, real wages would have gone up. Instead, we have the greatest inequality of any country in the Western world. That's not trickling down.

JAY: Part of Reaganomics was the relationship to foreign debt and what happened with interest rates. That was also why it wasn't very good for Brazils and other places. It did draw a lot of money back into the US. Wasn't that good for the US economy?

HUDSON: No, because it would have been good for the economy if the money coming back to the United States would have been invested in real, tangible capital formation. But it wasn't. The money coming into the United States took the form of loans by the upper 10 percent of the population to the bottom 90 percent. So the wealth coming back in ended up indebting the bottom 90 percent. The bottom 90 percent had to go into a lifetime of debt peonage in order to afford housing. There was a huge increase in housing prices. The advocates of Reaganomics said, look, he created balance sheet wealth; look at how everybody got rich off their houses. But when you say someone got rich off the value of their houses, that means new buyers have to pay much, much more of their future income to afford housing. So what they call wealth creation is actually debt creation that impoverished the economy, laying the groundwork for the bubble economy that burst under Bush and Obama.

JAY: Now, at the end of Reagan's presidency, what was the state of the union? What the narrative is: Reagan was one of the great economic presidents of our time.

HUDSON: Including the other four years of Bush, the Reagan Bush. The effect was to quadruple America's debt. Reagan crippled the country economically. That was the objective. His backers were predators. Making an economy free for predators is not what the classical economists meant by a free market. Adam Smith talked about businessmen getting together to establish a monopoly over the economy. Adam Smith would have turned over in his grave to say the Reagan idea of free markets is to open the markets to crooks, to fraudsters, to environmental degradation, to predators, to creditors.

JAY: So how does Reagan emerge, then, as one of the great heroes of modern presidency, and particularly of free-market, small-government success story?

HUDSON: Well, if you're a predator and a wealthy Wall Street investor and you control the media, you would want to applaud him too. Remember, the people who are applauding Reagan are the people who applaud Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia as a freedom fighter when he was the biggest embezzler in Russia. These are the people who applaud criminals. For them, the criminals are economic success stories, not criminals. So if you want to call crime an economic success, then of course you're going to applaud Reagan, rightly so.

JAY: Sarah Palin--[former] governor Sarah Palin's going to be speaking at one of the events celebrating Reagan's birth. What do you make of the way that the Tea Party adopts Reagan, I guess, as one of their ideological gods?

HUDSON: I would say that the Tea Party has an agenda that is subsidized by very wealthy people whose objective is to distract the members of the Tea Party from how the economy actually works and to turn their frustration against each other, and especially against higher-paid labor. I remember once I was driving with Herman Kahn over to visit Governor Rockefeller. And we were in the car, being driven by Rockefeller's chauffeur, and Herman turned to me and said, you know, Governor Rockefeller's chauffeur is not jealous of Governor Rockefeller; he's jealous of the other chauffeurs for the Harrimans and the people who live near the estate who get paid more. That's the Tea Party strategy: get labor jealous of public sector labor who might pay more, jealous of people who've been evicted but somehow are able to keep their houses. You turn the fighting within, rather than against the people who are actually fighting them. This is class war 101.

JAY: Thanks for joining us, Michael.

HUDSON: Thank you very much.

JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.


Thanks for this to BS Alert.

Non News

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Repugnican Perfidy in Iowa

Image from here.

What follows came from Harper's Magazine, October 2010.

The article was labeled "Squawkeye State." It derives from the Iowa Republican Party's 387-plank platform which was posted on their website this year. It should give pause, I think, to President Obama and any other progressive who believes it is possible to compromise with Repugnicans.


Here it is.  Read it and weep - for Iowa, for our country!

The function of law is to protect the free exercise of a person's God-given rights:  life, liberty, and the right to property (pursuit of happiness).

We call for the repeal of all mandatory minimum-wage laws.

 We call for reinstating, with proper safeguards, the death penalty for murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and drug dealers, with a firm limit of twenty-four months for appeals and no intrusion of federal authorities.

We believe that claims of human-caused global warming are based on fraudulent, inaccurate information, and that legislation and policy based on this information are detrimental to the well-being of the United States.

We believe all individuals and business owners have the freedom to choose the quality of air in their homes and establishments.

We call for the elimination of the Iowa Department of Education and of the U.S. Department of Education.

We support abolition of the IRS.

We call for the repeal of the Federal Reserve Act, eliminating the Federal Reserve, and we support returning to the gold and/or silver standard.

We believe candidates running as Republicans for any local or state office should be required to complete and return to the Republican Party of Iowa a signed questionaire indicating whether the candidate agrees, disagrees, or is undecided about each plank of the current party platform.

That's it.  You can cry now.  The neanderthals have taken over!  Iowa, unfortunately, is just one state where this has happened.  Ignorance and self-interest rule!

Fubar

 And you get an even bigger ribbon if you become "born again" and believe in Jesus.

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.