Bush/McCain

You know it's bad when you can't even muster a successful fundraiser in your own backyard (from Phoenix Biz Journal):

A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.

Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more anti-war protesters showing up outside the venue than attending the fundraiser inside.

Another source said there were concerns about the media covering the event.

Bush's Arizona fundraising effort for McCain is being moved to private residences in the Phoenix area. A White House official said the event was being moved because the McCain campaign prefers private fundraisers and it is Bush administration policy to have events in public venues open to the media. The White House official said to reconcile that the Tuesday event will be held at a private venue and not the Convention Center.

Convention Center personnel confirmed the event has been canceled at their venue.

Tickets to the event were to range from $1,000 to $25,000 for VIP treatment. Money was to go toward McCain's presidential bid and a number of Republican Party organs.

Anti-war protesters were planning to be out in force. President Bush's job approval rating stands at 31 percent, according to RealClearPolitics.com.

The McCain campaign referred questions on the fundraiser change to the White House press office.

I had planned on going to the protest, but they've taken all the fun out of it by cancelling. They thought that it might not look good on the evening news to have their patrons outnumbered by protesters.

There are no guarantees that McCain will even win his home state in November. In a historically conservative state, his wishy-washy bonafides on the right will keep many Republicans home on election day. And Dems will turn out in record numbers to assure that we don't have 4 more years of Bush policies.

"The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship." -- Marcel Achard (French Playwright, 1899-1974)

Stimulate this

Dumb, dumb, dumb. In typical Republican fashion, the President thinks the best way to get out of a problem is to spend your way out of it. The proposed economic stimulus plan suggests just that. That was his response to 9/11 and it's his response to an economic downturn. To be fair, it appears to also be the answer of our leading Democrats.

The people that will get the most are the ones that need it the least and that are likely to just save it. So, you've rewarded the rich, done nothing to help the economy and have effectively handed off a larger deficit to the incoming administration. Brilliant.

I'd gladly give every bit of refund that we would get if it would help move us closer to universal healthcare or to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Instead of attacking the real causes of why people can't make ends meet, they've done a blatant attention-grabbing stunt to mollify the electorate and make the Republican candidates look better.

When are these idiots going to get it through their thick fucking heads that trickle-down doesn't work? We need a trickle-up policy. Until you lift people out of poverty, you are going to have an increasingly two-class society.

Now, someone I like a lot, Paul Krugman, has said all this better than me:

Published on Friday, January 25, 2008 by The New York Times
Stimulus Gone Bad
by Paul Krugman

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan - which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape - looks like a lemon.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

Those are harsh words, so let me explain what’s going on.

Aside from business tax breaks - which are an unhappy story for another column - the plan gives each worker making less than $75,000 a $300 check, plus additional amounts to people who make enough to pay substantial sums in income tax. This ensures that the bulk of the money would go to people who are doing O.K. financially - which misses the whole point.

The goal of a stimulus plan should be to support overall spending, so as to avert or limit the depth of a recession. If the money the government lays out doesn’t get spent - if it just gets added to people’s bank accounts or used to pay off debts - the plan will have failed.

And sending checks to people in good financial shape does little or nothing to increase overall spending. People who have good incomes, good credit and secure employment make spending decisions based on their long-term earning power rather than the size of their latest paycheck. Give such people a few hundred extra dollars, and they’ll just put it in the bank.

In fact, that appears to be what mainly happened to the tax rebates affluent Americans received during the last recession in 2001.

On the other hand, money delivered to people who aren’t in good financial shape - who are short on cash and living check to check - does double duty: it alleviates hardship and also pumps up consumer spending.

That’s why many of the stimulus proposals we were hearing just a few days ago focused in the first place on expanding programs that specifically help people who have fallen on hard times, especially unemployment insurance and food stamps. And these were the stimulus ideas that received the highest grades in a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

There was also some talk among Democrats about providing temporary aid to state and local governments, whose finances are being pummeled by the weakening economy. Like help for the unemployed, this would have done double duty, averting hardship and heading off spending cuts that could worsen the downturn.

But the Bush administration has apparently succeeded in killing all of these ideas, in favor of a plan that mainly gives money to those least likely to spend it.

Why would the administration want to do this? It has nothing to do with economic efficacy: no economic theory or evidence I know of says that upper-middle-class families are more likely to spend rebate checks than the poor and unemployed. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the Bush administration refuses to sign on to anything that it can’t call a “tax cut.”

Behind that refusal, in turn, lies the administration’s commitment to slashing tax rates on the affluent while blocking aid for families in trouble - a commitment that requires maintaining the pretense that government spending is always bad. And the result is a plan that not only fails to deliver help where it’s most needed, but is likely to fail as an economic measure.

The words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt come to mind: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

And the worst of it is that the Democrats, who should have been in a strong position - does this administration have any credibility left on economic policy? - appear to have caved in almost completely.

Yes, they extracted some concessions, increasing rebates for people with low income while reducing giveaways to the affluent. But basically they allowed themselves to be bullied into doing things the Bush administration’s way.

And that could turn out to be a very bad thing.

We don’t know for sure how deep the coming slump will be, or even whether it will meet the technical definition of a recession. But there’s a real chance not just that it will be a major downturn, but that the usual response to recession - interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve - won’t be sufficient to turn the economy around. (For more on this, see my blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)

And if that happens, we’ll deeply regret the fact that the Bush administration insisted on, and Democrats accepted, a so-called stimulus plan that just won’t do the job.

Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a regular New York Times columnist. His most recent book is The Conscience of a Liberal.

Kids

Bush cares about kids ... right.





Our kids may not have healthcare, but at least our "chidrens do learn". It's just our moron president that doesn't.

Loaded Questions

Oh, I long for the day when I don't have to have the kind of exchanges that I had today ...

New client - mom of a chiropractor that's one of my clients. Nice nondescript house. Maybe just a few too many bibles lying around (like maybe 50 too many) but otherwise normal. Then I get into their home office. This is on the wall:



Two cheesy photos with real authentic faux signatures. Nice. Be afraid when someone considers it a point of pride to have given money to George Bush.

Fast-forward about 15 minutes. Everything's going normal. Just fixing their computer. Then the lady comes back in the room and asks me some computer questions. She says that she heard on FOX News that terrorists could bring all the world's computer down at once. Trying not to sound too sarcastic, I comment that that sounds like something that you would hear on FOX. And then I try to soften my disdain by going into an honest discussion of the security of PC's, networks, the Internet, etc.

Next, she talks about some anti-spyware program. She says that it was endorsed by Michael Savage and asked me what I thought about him. I did say, "I'm not a fan" but I wanted to say, "He's a fucking clueless, racist, religiously bigoted hypocrite" who says stupid things like:

"I don't like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke...I want to vomit when I hear it. I think it's child abuse."

... and speculated that Democrats had messed with Supreme Court justice John Roberts' health, causing his seizure.

Some days it's real hard to keep my mouth shut.

Apparently, this is what conservative commentators have been reduced to -- corporate pimps. I'd commented on that very same point back in January, talking about Michael Medved. They must be getting kickbacks.

If I were religious, seeing what so-called "Christians" really value would probably cause me to lose my faith. And if I were a Conservative, seeing how idealism is bought and sold for convenience, I'd give that up too. Kinda makes you wonder if anybody really believes in anything any more.

Rove

I feel sorry for anyone that had to witness the most disingenuous, the most delusional, the most pathetic resignation speech of all time today by "Turd Blossom", Karl Rove:

"I'm grateful to have been a witness to history. It has been the joy and the honor of a lifetime," said Rove, his voice quivering at times.

Excuse me while I get sick. Infamy may be the more appropriate word. History will mark your time here but not in a good way. Your legacy will be a level of partisanship and divisiveness unlike any in this country's history. A so-called "boy genius" who leaves a lame duck president with an unwinnable war and a Democratic majority in Congress. Have you gotten "joy" out of over 3,500 American deaths and 50,000+ Iraqi civilian deaths?

"But now is the time. ... At month's end," Rove said, "I will join those whom you meet in your travels, the ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you."

They are praying for you because they feel you'll need it. You've got a one-way ticket to hell after selling your soul many times over.



Good bye, Karl. Hopefully we'll not have to listen to any more of your brilliant quips:

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."

"We will f**k him. Do you hear me? We will f**k him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f**ked him." -to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him.

"The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering." -- Michael Shermer

The Rabbit Hole

He Still Believes ...

Cognitive Dissonance

There is a psychological term that best describes people that voted for Bush: cognitive dissonance.

This is a mental state of people where they find themselves contradicting themselves by doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions contradictory to other opinions that they have.

Put another way, many people voted for Bush believing his lies, and now that his lies are being exposed, they still want to believe they made the correct decision. They'll strongly defend their choice and not accept they made a mistake rather than lose face.

What other explantion could there be for people continuing to give Bush and his administration a free pass? Every justification for the Iraq war has been refuted. A group of people who are supposedly for limited government, the sanctity of marriage, states' rights and fiscal responsibility have violated every one of those beliefs. Yet you won't hear other Republicans say a negative word of any of it. They'll just put some spin on it.

Bahhh, we the sheep-le.

Ignorance is Bliss

"Promoting or favoring progress toward better conditions or new policies, ideas, or methods" -- the textbook definition of progressive. One would think that all people would want to strive for these things. That is, unless you had met a conservative. To all too many of them, progress and truth are things to be hidden. Yet a few examples:


Senate Rejects Birth Control and Other Proposals to Reduce the Need for Abortion. Abortions have went up under Bush. Ironic when you consider that they say they are pro-life.

GOP Boards Up the 'Town Hall'. This happened because too many people were actually asking questions. What a novel concept for a town hall meeting ... questions.

Catholics are advised to avoid 'Da Vinci Code'. While this one is not specifically about conservatives, it IS about the religious zealotry that permeates the right. Be afraid of truth ... "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".

The Right to Die

Recent events have brought to the forefront the controversial subject of euthanasia and the right to die. Whether it's someone taking their own life(Hunter S. Thompson) or someone they love making the choice for them when they can't(Terri Schiavo), it's a polarizing subject. We think nothing of sending 1490+ young men and women to their deaths ... not to mention 15000+ Iraqis. Yet we won't allow someone (or someone they love) the dignity of making their own choice. It's even immortalized in film, Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside.

It all comes down to the role we want government and church to make in our lives. Ultimately, someone in power shouldn't allow their religious beliefs forbidding euthanasia to make that same decision for those who don't share it. In what is fast becoming a broken record, yet another Bush, Jeb, is using the power of his office to meddle in the power of the judiciary and, in turn, our lives.

It's a complete disregard of the secular nature of our governnment. God is ruling decisions. This is not how our founding fathers intended:

Secular Nature of Government
Founding Fathers and Religion

It's Great to be a Bush

Ah, nepotism is alive and well. It's sure nice to have W as a nephew. :-)

"Bucky" Bush

Democracy in Action

We should be proud we got Bush elected. Just look at all the great reasons we elected him:

• Bush is more moral.
• We were against liberal elitism.
• We felt more secure with Bush.
• Republicans don't "play politics".
  
  What a bunch of hypocrites.