Fox News has graduated from being just a Republican propaganda machine to something more diabolical. In whipping up hatred towards President Obama, Fox News host Glenn Beck has led the way by calling him a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, and a non-US Citizen. On Mar 23, 2010 he went so far as to suggest that the Obama administration was "coming after him" and may actually kill him. Fox News efforts to discredit Obama is fair game, but their efforts to demonize and destroy him is poisoning people’s minds; and Fox has more than a little to do with the fact that President Obama receives more than 30 death threats a day, an unprecedented number. Remember how in 1901 an anarchist assassinated President McKinley after being strongly influenced by the New York Journal’s non-stop hate campaign against McKinley. http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003230049
Now with the assassination attempt on Democratic House of Representative Gabrielle Giffords Jan 8th everyone is scrambling for answers, including Fox News; and Fox and Friends were quick to say that the Congresswoman should have had better security, but gave no hint of being culpable. The assassin, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, has connections to anti-government American Renaissance who are closely aligned with the white supremacist New Century Foundation, an anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic hate group (Giffords is Jewish).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/09/american-renaissance-jared-loughner_n_806472.html
Loughner’s “Myspace” page posted anti-government text and videos. They provide strong clues that he was a close follower of Fox News, and in particular Glenn Beck. For example, he was obsessed with a prophecy that predicts the world will end in 2012. Where did he get this wacky idea? In July 2010 Glenn Beck on Fox News plugged John Hagee's book, “Can America Survive? 10 Prophetic Signs That We Are the Terminal Generation.” And recently on Dec 14, 2010, Glenn Beck on Fox News talked with Joel Rosenberg about the end times coming.
In another Loughner video he made reference to revolution and told viewers: "You don't have to accept the federalist laws," claiming that the government was imposing "mind control and brainwash on the people." Did Glenn Beck put this idea into Loughner’s head? On March 5, 2010 Glenn Beck on Fox News did a special on “Indoctrination of Your Kids: An American Epidemic.” He said while you’re going about your day, your kids and grandkids were being brainwashed into little “progressives.” He said, “Add this to the Top 10 list of reasons to ditch your public school.” In one of Beck’s frequently topics, “big government takeovers committed by the brainwashing Leninist-liberal-socialist-fascist-Marxists,” he puts blame squarely on the democrats. These were powerful accusations that must have been the kickoff for Loughner to start his planning to get everyone’s attention. http://hef.org.nz/2010/glenn-beck-on-the-brainwashing-of-your-kids-in-public-school-youtube-15310
http://nyunews.com/opinion/2010/04/13/14surico
Another Loughner video called for a return to the gold standard, a common theme on Fox News. The parallels all fall into place.
Loughner targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords because she voted for Obama Care, and then beat out Tea party favorite Jesse Kelly in Nov 2001. Living just down the street from Congresswoman Giffords, she became the obvious target for his plans. Here are some of the Fox News propaganda clips Loughner was sure to have seen as his anger slowly built to a point that he felt he was forced, in the name of God and country, to take action.
*Jun 2009. Glenn Beck on Fox News stated that Obama Care would dismantle the U.S. health care system and strengthening the power of the federal government.
* June - Sep 2009. During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords, Republican Tea Party challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on Fox News in military gear holding his automatic weapon. He held several M16 Shooting Events labeled, “Help Remove Gabrielle Giffords from Office,” and "Get On Target for Victory," all faithfully reported on Fox.
* Mar 2010. Giffords was a “target” on Sarah Palin’s list of politicians who needed to be taken down. As a consultant on Fox News she showed a map of the United States, with crosshair targets located over 20 districts whose representatives voted for Obama Care including Giffords. The caption said "Take Back the 20!" and, "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" If Loughner saw a target almost over his mother’s house, he must have gone berserk.
* Jan 7, 2011. On Friday night's edition of "The O'Reilly Factor," on Fox Glenn Beck said he felt that Obama Care was "destroying our country." For Loughner this must have been the final straw, because the very next morning he carried out the plan that Fox might have imbedded into his distorted little mind.
When Beck preaches a fraudulently anti-government insane theory, there will be always someone who believes in what he is saying; a person who feels he/she can right the world by doing something that has tragic consequences; and 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner did just that.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/9/934592/-Loughner-believed-in-tea-party-ideas
The Tea Party’s Cause
Looking to the Glory Days of Teddy Roosevelt
Nov 4, 2010. There have been a couple of editorials trying to figure out the tea party’s slogans, "Take our country back" and “We’re taxed too much.” Harold Meyerson writes “When Tea Party Wants to Go Back, Where is It To?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/26/AR2010102605216.html saying tea partiers believe our President is leading the nation down the path to “socialism,” a word he believes they don’t truly comprehend. Eugene Robinson in “Decoding the Tea Party's Ire” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/01/AR2010110106731.html?referrer=newstrust says, “the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black.” They both have some valid points but leave all of us (including the tea partiers) somewhat confused about their aims. Since federal taxes in 2009/10 were down for 98% of the people and the Bush tax cuts saw to it that 52 million (19 million more than in 2000) had to pay no federal income tax (about 47 percent of US tax payers), well it is left up to me to provide a better perspective on tea partiers' aspirations. Here then is that crystal clear explanation of that phenomenon sweeping our country.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0
President Obama is taking the country towards socialism, not for the first time, rather it’s back to the future, the socialism of the 50’s when income redistribution favored the masses – those middle class people that punched a nine to five time clock. Obama wants to take the country back to those days of socialism, i.e., Robin Hood taking from the hard working rich to feed the free loaders, many too lazy to work. Fortunately for our country, over the last 30 years, we’ve seen this redistribution of wealth undone with much less of the income going to the bottom 90 percent of Americans. We’ve stopped this hemorrhaging of the socialist period between 1950 and 1980 when the average income for the bottom 90% grew from $17,719 in 1950 to $30,941, a scandalous 75 percent increase in income. Starting in 1981 Reagan halted this deplorable increase and the share of all income going to the bottom 90 percent started declining, going from 65 percent to 52 percent in 2007. The Reagan Revolution caused unions to lose their clout and forced people in the middle class to get off their rear ends and start once again working hard for their wages. In the mean time the lives of the rich brightened considerably. The share of income going to America's wealthiest one percent rose from nine percent in 1981 to a respectable 23.5 percent in 2007. Looking at these numbers, people in the Tea Party need to be ecstatic, but at the same time scared to death that about half of them may actually have to start paying any taxes at all. Obama wants to take our country back to the period between 1950 and 1980 when the vast majority of Americans enjoyed more of the American pie than they deserved, a time when socialism flourished. Today’s American woes are traceable back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal which produced the only three decades in American history -- the '50s, '60s and '70s -- when economic wealth was widely shared with the masses, socialism run amuck, a time of socialist INCOME REDISTRIBUTION! It was the only period in American history when unions were big and powerful to ensure that corporate revenue was taken away from the rich and given to the workers – Robin Hood in his finest hour. And during this time taxes on the rich were significantly higher than taxes on the middle class with the top bracket at 91% under that socialist Eisenhower. Tea partiers don’t want to look at that side of Eisenhower since he saved the world from Hitler and since Obama is Hitler reincarnate. And Eisenhower made sure that the minimum wage kept pace with the cost of living, another socialist redistribution of the wealth gimmick. And it was the only time when rich Americans felt uncomfortable about their ominous economic burden to support continued American expansion. But since the ascent of Ronald Reagan, America's claim to being a land of the rich has become once again a reality. Unions have dwindled; colleges have become unaffordable for the masses; manufacturing has gone abroad where factory owners can get a decent profit; and most importantly - taxes on the rich have plummeted. Now Obama wants to return to the socialist America of the 50’s and again raise taxes on the rich. So tea partiers should look for a return of the glory days before the New Deal – the time of Teddy Roosevelt when Social Security, unions, and the minimum wage were unknown; a time when our country fought wars for glory; a time when the Monroe Doctrine meant something; a time when Imperialist America was expanding west across the Pacific taking the Philippians and to the south taking Cuba; a time when there were no child labor laws and kids could work hard instead of sitting around twittering; and a time when the brightest like the Wright Brothers and Henry J. Ford could lead the rest of the world in new directions without all those socialist government controls. Now we have a president of color who has turned the country away from tea partiers’ European heritage of class and race distinction. Well, tea partiers are going to get exactly what they deserve, that is for those rich one percent of them. After all who drinks tea and who drinks beer?
Nov 4, 2010. There have been a couple of editorials trying to figure out the tea party’s slogans, "Take our country back" and “We’re taxed too much.” Harold Meyerson writes “When Tea Party Wants to Go Back, Where is It To?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/26/AR2010102605216.html saying tea partiers believe our President is leading the nation down the path to “socialism,” a word he believes they don’t truly comprehend. Eugene Robinson in “Decoding the Tea Party's Ire” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/01/AR2010110106731.html?referrer=newstrust says, “the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black.” They both have some valid points but leave all of us (including the tea partiers) somewhat confused about their aims. Since federal taxes in 2009/10 were down for 98% of the people and the Bush tax cuts saw to it that 52 million (19 million more than in 2000) had to pay no federal income tax (about 47 percent of US tax payers), well it is left up to me to provide a better perspective on tea partiers' aspirations. Here then is that crystal clear explanation of that phenomenon sweeping our country.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0
President Obama is taking the country towards socialism, not for the first time, rather it’s back to the future, the socialism of the 50’s when income redistribution favored the masses – those middle class people that punched a nine to five time clock. Obama wants to take the country back to those days of socialism, i.e., Robin Hood taking from the hard working rich to feed the free loaders, many too lazy to work. Fortunately for our country, over the last 30 years, we’ve seen this redistribution of wealth undone with much less of the income going to the bottom 90 percent of Americans. We’ve stopped this hemorrhaging of the socialist period between 1950 and 1980 when the average income for the bottom 90% grew from $17,719 in 1950 to $30,941, a scandalous 75 percent increase in income. Starting in 1981 Reagan halted this deplorable increase and the share of all income going to the bottom 90 percent started declining, going from 65 percent to 52 percent in 2007. The Reagan Revolution caused unions to lose their clout and forced people in the middle class to get off their rear ends and start once again working hard for their wages. In the mean time the lives of the rich brightened considerably. The share of income going to America's wealthiest one percent rose from nine percent in 1981 to a respectable 23.5 percent in 2007. Looking at these numbers, people in the Tea Party need to be ecstatic, but at the same time scared to death that about half of them may actually have to start paying any taxes at all. Obama wants to take our country back to the period between 1950 and 1980 when the vast majority of Americans enjoyed more of the American pie than they deserved, a time when socialism flourished. Today’s American woes are traceable back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal which produced the only three decades in American history -- the '50s, '60s and '70s -- when economic wealth was widely shared with the masses, socialism run amuck, a time of socialist INCOME REDISTRIBUTION! It was the only period in American history when unions were big and powerful to ensure that corporate revenue was taken away from the rich and given to the workers – Robin Hood in his finest hour. And during this time taxes on the rich were significantly higher than taxes on the middle class with the top bracket at 91% under that socialist Eisenhower. Tea partiers don’t want to look at that side of Eisenhower since he saved the world from Hitler and since Obama is Hitler reincarnate. And Eisenhower made sure that the minimum wage kept pace with the cost of living, another socialist redistribution of the wealth gimmick. And it was the only time when rich Americans felt uncomfortable about their ominous economic burden to support continued American expansion. But since the ascent of Ronald Reagan, America's claim to being a land of the rich has become once again a reality. Unions have dwindled; colleges have become unaffordable for the masses; manufacturing has gone abroad where factory owners can get a decent profit; and most importantly - taxes on the rich have plummeted. Now Obama wants to return to the socialist America of the 50’s and again raise taxes on the rich. So tea partiers should look for a return of the glory days before the New Deal – the time of Teddy Roosevelt when Social Security, unions, and the minimum wage were unknown; a time when our country fought wars for glory; a time when the Monroe Doctrine meant something; a time when Imperialist America was expanding west across the Pacific taking the Philippians and to the south taking Cuba; a time when there were no child labor laws and kids could work hard instead of sitting around twittering; and a time when the brightest like the Wright Brothers and Henry J. Ford could lead the rest of the world in new directions without all those socialist government controls. Now we have a president of color who has turned the country away from tea partiers’ European heritage of class and race distinction. Well, tea partiers are going to get exactly what they deserve, that is for those rich one percent of them. After all who drinks tea and who drinks beer?
Candidates Shy Away from Important Issues
Nov 4, 2010. Did you vote for a candidate that was
* Afraid to address the real issues
* Distorted the facts or
* Used canned phases that have little meaning, i.e., “Government is broken,” “We need to take back our country,” “Big government has run amuck” and “Our leaders have led the nation adrift: we need change now” ?????
There was one day of rolling in the election tsunami for tea partiers and Republicans. Now it’s payback time to the corporations that so lavishly funded those winners. It’s time to own up to the deceptive advertising that hoodwinked the electorate by saying the budget could be balanced by reducing taxes. It’s time to finally put something out there that replaces Obama Care and the financial reform law rather than just trying to repeal them. It’s time to get a comprehensive energy bill under the new Chairman of the House Energy Committee, Rep Joe Barton (R-Texas) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton, and immigration reform under the leadership of the new Chairman of the House Immigration Committee, Rep Steve King (R- Iowa) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_King. Obama will most assuredly be able to work with these two, along with the rest of the Republican House of Representatives - right? Here’s a clip that shows just how closely the two sides might work together -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#39998808
And for those of you out there fed a pack of lies by the folks you trusted in and voted for, here then are the hard core facts. Read it a weep.
The Shrinking Big Government. There have been no new federal programs started since 2009, nothing like the huge government expansion between 2000 and 2008 when non-military domestic expenditures set new records in growth. Welfare state spending increased 32%; public assistance increased 17%; housing assistance increased 12%; federal student loans increased 129%.; food and nutrition assistance increased 43%; social security increased 19%; and medical care increased 54% as result of the unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003. Currently there are no giant infrastructure projects under way and no huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor. Spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, have risen because there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help, and there have been substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions - although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. The total number of government workers in America has been falling in the last two years with government payrolls falling by more than 350,000 since January 2009. The small increase in federal employment (mainly defense and security) was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level. Obama Care has yet to kick in but when it does, we will still have a private health care system. Since 2009, we may have finally capped big government expansion. So how did the public become so convinced government was growing rather than shrinking? Does the disinformation coming from Fox News influence the entire American population?
http://www.aier.org/research/briefs/750-big-government-under-the-bush-administration
TARP and the Stimulus - Irresponsible Government or Savior? The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out banks under President George W. Bush in Oct 2008 was originally expected to cost the U.S. Government $356 billion, but wound up costing only $30 billion, significantly less than the taxpayers' cost of the S&L crisis costing U.S. tax payers $125 billion under W’s father in the late 1980s. Originally under TARP it was once feared the government would be holding companies like GM, AIG and Citigroup for several years, but those companies bought back most of the Treasury's stake and emerge from TARP within a year. And for the Recovery Act of 2009 and 2010 (the Stimulus Bill) under President Barak Obama; well it wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy and was not mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Stimulus Bill more than 40% came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments, with another chuck going to pay for unemployment insurance. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending. Luckily government spending did not surge, and in hind sight the Democratic Congress enacted a much smaller than needed stimulus package, but a stimulus that was better than none at all. Small as it was, the Obama stimulus and the Bush TARP actually save the U.S. from a similar 1929 crash. But because the size of the Federal Government was not increased (as FDR did during the Great Depression of ‘29) unemployment remained high. So why did people think these two programs were giveaways wilding increasing the federal debt when in fact the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit for the foreseeable future? http://1bob7.blogspot.com/2008/12/stimulus-package.html http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036
The Bipartisan Debt Commission. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was created in 2010 by President Barack Obama to come up with a plan to reduce our $13 trillion debt. Their solution - two thirds (2/3) will have to be covered with spending cuts and the other third (1/3) by increasing tax revenue. Democrats on the commission appear ready to accept a cap on discretionary spending -- similar to those that worked in the 1990s, a major across-the-board cut in all agencies. The discretionary budget (non-defense @ 24% and defense @ 16%) accounts for 40% of the federal budget with mandatory programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) being the other 60%. Republican commissioners, in turn, seem to be warming to the idea of eliminating tax loopholes, including mortgage and charitable deductions as a trade off for lower income tax rates.
* Democrats will have to swallow spending cuts to their beloved "discretionary" programs, i.e., alternative energy sources, agriculture, training, science, housing, transportation, education, and urban development.
* Republicans will have to accept modest increase in tax revenues coupled with much larger spending cuts. Yet ultra conservative Republicans and blue dog Democrats are rejecting anything that might be labeled a tax increase, even eliminating tax giveaways and loopholes. Paradoxically, they are going to be the obstacle blocking the way toward a shrunken government and a reduced debt.
* Both sides will have to accept cuts in defense spending. This may be the hardest area to tackle, but it is the one most out of control. Some candidates are actually pushing for more military spending with no one on the side of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who appears to be the lone ranger in trying to bring down military costs now in its 13th straight year of uninterrupted growth.
So why did candidates not talk about the findings and recommendations of the Bipartisan Debt Commission? Their hard work is virtually unknown to the electorate. Instead we heard candidates calling for tax reduction in order to deduce the debt. Why didn’t the electorate see through this shell game?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100106221.html
Taxes.
* The Freeloaders. The number of Americans who pay no taxes continues to increase. We are close to the point at which half of the population will not pay taxes for government benefits they receive. The recent growth in the number of non federal income tax payers started during the 1990s followed by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. First the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 expanded the earned income tax credit. The second change was the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 which created a $500 per-child tax credit for families earning less than $110,000. In 1990, there were 23.8 million non-payers, but as a result of these legislative changes, 2000 arrived with 32.5 million non-payers. That was a percentage increase of 36. Entering the 2000s with one in four tax filers owing nothing, the non-payers pool was supercharged by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003—especially by the doubling of the child credit to $1,000. By 2004, when the credit expansion was fully phased in, the number of non-payers increased by 10.5 million, a 32-percent jump in the space of four years. In tax year 2008, the major tax change that created a record number of non- payers was the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which included a tax rebate of $300 per person, $600 per couple. A family of four was eligible for a rebate of $1,200. These tax rebates boosted the number of non-payers to nearly 52 million, 19 million more than the number of non-payers in 2000 when President Bill Clinton left office. This represents a 58.6 percent increase in the number of non-payers in less than a decade. Federal taxes in 2009/10 were down for 98% of the people and the Bush tax cuts saw to it that 47 percent of US tax payers paid nothing at all. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0
So why didn’t the candidates focused on these freeloaders but rather on breaks needed for the wealthy. This was a political missed opportunity for many candidates.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/25962.html
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/10/the-2010-index-of-dependence-on-government
* Tax Cuts and Debt Go Hand-in-hand. After imposition of the Bush Tax Cuts in 2001 and 2003, the national debt doubled in the succeeding Bush years. His was the worst eight-year economic record of any modern president. Worse still, by 2007 the U.S. reached levels of income inequality not since 1929. And despite claims by President W. Bush that these tax cuts "meant people had more money in their pocket," our incomes dropped ominously after those tax cuts. So why did Americans buy into voodoo economics and believe in candidates who promised debt reduction and economic good times if only all of the Bush tax cuts could be extended? After all, what happened (and continues to happen) to the debt since enactment of the Bush Tax Cuts is not all that far in the past. http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/001985.htm
* Compared to the Rest of the Industrialized World, We’re actually Under-taxed.
The U.S. tax burden for all taxes a percentage of the GDP is 28.2%, and with the exception of Japan (which is one notch lower at 27%), the US is taxed less than the rest of the industrialized world, i.e., 49-50% - Denmark and Sweden; 43-47% - Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, and Norway; 39-42% - Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and UK; 36-38% - Czech Republic, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain; 33-35% - Barbados, Canada, Ireland, and Poland; and 30-31% - Australia and Switzerland. This is a real bargain considering our spending habits:
- Our defense spending accounts for 54% of the total National Budget. In comparison, the country that spends the second highest percent of their budget on defense is China at 6.3% (2009 budget).
- In no league with military spending but greatly more expensive than any other country is our cost to incarceration our citizens with more people in jail today (as a percentage of the population) than any other country. For example, incarceration rates in the United Kingdom are one fifth of those in the U.S, one ninth in Germany, and one twelfth in Japan. The cost of our prison system is $75 billion per year. Congress must bear responsibility for this cost after passing drug laws that have swelled prison populations by treating it as a crime rather than an addiction as most countries have done.
So why did some candidates scream that we are being taxed to death while keeping quiet on how to pay for our two unfunded wars, stationing of troops in friendly countries (70,000 in Germany for over six decades since World War II and 40,000 in South Korea for five decades since the Korean War); and a prison system loaded with drug offenders who could be in treatment programs rather than costing tax payers $20,000 a year per inmate?
http://geekpolitics.com/what-do-azerbaijan-djibouti-and-suriname-have-in-common
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content-hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=104.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer
Defense. We account for just under half of the world’s total military spending (46.5%) with China in second place at a distant 6.6%. The US has quit literally taken up the mantle of world protector while letting its economy slips into more and more trouble. Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in a vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica. The 2010 Military Budget, at $965 billion is 36% of the total $2.65 trillion National Budget and, considering veterans’ benefits and interest on the national debt created by military spending, it’s 54% of the total National Budget – over half. It has risen 76% between FY 2002 and 2010, and we are now in our 13th straight year of uninterrupted growth in the defense budget, an unprecedented rise in spending that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has rightly termed a “gusher.” But the Pentagon has carefully scatters bases and defense dollars in every Congressional district, making it difficult for legislators to curtail spending on their home turf. For example, when Gates proposed that DoD save money by closing the Joint Forces Command, a bureaucracy overloaded with government pencil pushers and private contractors charging exurbanite rates for war plans usually put away on dusty shelves, well the suggestion drew howls of protest from Virginia’s entire Congressional delegation, people who for the most part want to reduce our debt. So didn’t some candidates step up to the plate in strong support of Secretary Gates?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/06/less_is_more.html
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Issues/Budget-Impact/2010/10/08/Neocons-Talk-Deficit-but-Wont-Budge-on-Defense-Cuts.aspx
Security. As part of the defense budget, the explosive expansion of the intelligence community since 9/11 has been a huge success for that little ole man sitting somewhere in a mountain cave. Bin Laden most assuredly has been gloating over his victory by causing America to go paranoid with billions of dollars spent on building up a gargantuan and cumbersome security community that is being sucked under by its own bureaucratic quagmire. The costs to taxpayers are enormous. A Washington Post's two-year investigative report identified 118 federal contracts worth $745.5 billion (77% of the entire defense budget) that had significant waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, with 854,000 people holding top-secret security clearances. Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and has a budget of $6 billion. As for its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion. From the very beginning, security experts and even their own inspectors have been pointing to the absurdity of TSA's and DHS's spending patterns. Congress has fought back against the critics, repeatedly allocating money to unnecessary projects. So why didn’t some candidates stand up to this waste?
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control
Campaign Finance Reform. This midterm election campaigns have set new records in campaign contributions with no requirement to disclose donors based on a recent Supreme Court decision. Recipients will most assuredly be on the hook to pay back corporate donors with favorable legislation. Congress has talked about this for years doing little. So why didn’t candidates pledge to correct this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_in_the_United_States
Line Item Veto. Another cost saving issue that congress has talked about for years is the line item veto power given to the president, allowing the president to strike the “pork” from large appropriations bills. Yet congress keeps kicking the bucket down the road. So why didn’t candidates pledge to correct this?
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37711.html
Government is Creating Debt without a Clue to a Cost / Benefits Analysis. Government provides services to the public, some of which are cost effective, but when the services become overly expensive for the same services that could be provided at a fraction of the cost, well where are the politicians to blow the whistle? Case in point is the Norfolk light rail expansion through Virginia Beach. By building a prohibitively expensive light rail system that cannot manage low fares and maintain an efficient service, local government shows its worst side by digging us deep into debt. Thirty municipalities (including Richmond) took a look at their light rail options and chose Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)(light rail on tires) which came in at least 1/5 the cost of light rail with money left over to provide customer friendly benefits such as more frequent intervals between buses than light rail. Virginia Beach has funded a $6.6 million Virginia Beach Transit Extension Study (VBTES) with an Alternatives Analysis (AA) for BRT. Most folks don’t know about the study as politicians feel hell bent to sweep the study’s eventual recommendations under the rug while pushing the virtues of light rail, and even prematurely purchasing land for light rail construction ahead of what the study may deem best. Fiscally conservative candidates favor light rail for a system that will cost $20 per ride with the rider paying $2 and the tax payer making up the difference. The same may be said for the seventeen mile extension of the D.C. metro system (the Silver Line) to Dulles Airport now estimated to cost $6.6 billion. And to think, a 2000 study proposed BRT instead of rail using the already in-place dedicated Dulles Access Road for $287,300,000 or less than 5% of the cost of the current rail system now under construction. So why are fiscally conservative politicians so strongly in favor of this waste?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/15/AR2010091504927.html http://1bob1.blogspot.com/2008/05/brt.html
Reducing Health Care Insurance.
After passage of the new Affordable Health Care Reform Act, the price of premiums kept rising. The basic problem with Obama Care is that it added new levels of regulations and forced insurance companies to cover people they would not have covered in the past. While getting more people into the insurance pool was a good thing, it did not change the basic problem. Consumers do not know the prices of the services that they receive and sometimes pass on to insurers unnecessary procedures. The best way to get costs to go down is to make people aware of the prices that they pay for medical care. Another way is though wellness visits which is promoted through Obama Care. http://www.healthcare.gov
Nevertheless, the American Health Care Insurance industry has practically removed competition with a few giants sewing up most of the business. A public plan would rekindle completion and bring down costs. And contrary to criticism that a public option would force private insurers out of business, public and private plans have different competitive advantages and each plan would drive down costs for all.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/what-happened-to-a-public-health-plan
Even minus a government option (which Obama Care doesn’t have), the current federal health care law provides incentives for State Insurance Commissioner to negotiate more aggressively with providers to hold down health-care prices, and in 2014 states will be empowers to reject “unreasonable” rate increase requests by health insurers. In North Carolina, for example, the State Insurance Commissioner has already used the Obama Care law to roll back premium increases by 23 percent.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/28/barack-obama/obama-said-states-have-new-power-review-insurance-/
http://lincmad.blogspot.com/2010/10/full-transcript-of-obama-on-daily-show.html
We continue to look away from the rest of the world for a better health care model. The World Health Organization puts us at number 37. Would it not be prudent for our elected officials to look at some of these countries paying less and getting more? http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
Repealing Obama Care will be extremely difficult and defeat of the bill in the courts is a long shot. Therefore, politicians can either waste time in the next two years trying to repeal the law or try to make what’s already out there more affordable and better. So why did we hear only hostile attacks on Obama Care and no positive suggestions for a better system? The Republican solution is to provide a tax credit that can be applied towards the purchase of health insurance while keeping many of the new benefits that Americans like, but the GOP stance clearly does not create a solution. Simply leaving more money in the pocket of those who could actually use the tax credit will not put anywhere near enough healthy people back into the insurance pool. While this makes for a good election pitch that most Americans can understand, the idea will do little to nothing to insulate the American health care system from collapse if it is not made mandatory, which Obama Care does in 2014.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/22/can-obamacare-be-repealed
http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2010/09/01/the-ugly-truth-behind-america%E2%80%99s-objection-to-health-care-reform
The Food We Eat is Killing Us. The giants of the food industry continue to be largely unregulated with the high amounts of fructose corn syrup (a major player in the obesity epidemic), salt (a major player in heart attacks), and antibiotics in our meats and pesticides covering our fruits and vegetables (other killers). Americans are obsessed with nutrition yet our dietary health is poor. We’re the world champs in terms of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and the cancers linked to diet. We put warnings on cigarette packs but the food at McDonalds is more hazardous to our health. We need to change our priorities. So were the candidates silent on this vital health issue?
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/15/report-reduce-salt-fat-in-u-s-dietary-guidelines
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34614380/ns/health-infectious_diseases
http://food.change.org/blog/view/chemicals_are_killing_us
Energy. We imports 64% of our crude oil (much of it coming from terrorist sponsored nations) pushing our deficit to new heights and contributing to the selling of our country to the Chinese. At one twentieth of the world’s population, the US is using 20 million barrels of oil a day, 25% of the world's produced oil. That’s 60 times more oil usage per U.S. citizen than non-U.S. citizen. This could all be turned around by passage of two pieces of legislation now lingering in Congress. Since we are literally swimming in recent natural gas discoveries we could use natural gas for all of our energy needs becoming 100% energy independent. On April 05, 2009 Dan Boren (D-OK) introduced H.R. 1835, “the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act” (or “NAT GAS” Act), legislation that would provide incentives, mostly as tax credits, for gas-fueled vehicle production and overnight installation of natural gas filling stations. A year and a half later Congress still has not passed this legislation. Another fuel we produce right here in America is biofuel, non-eatable grasses and trees. To encourage biodiesel production, the federal government six years ago provided a biofuel tax incentive, but those incentives ran out at the end of 2009 because Congress failed to extent the credit, causing the fledgling U.S. biodiesel industry to suffer dearly. On Sep 16, 2010, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) attempted to add the renewal of the credit to a small business bill currently under consideration in the Senate, but his motion did not receive the necessary 67 votes. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, called Grassley’s motion another GOP proposal stunts meant to score political points. Thus big oil continues to hold Congress addicted to offshore oil. Why didn’t candidates pick up on this win-win issue? Perhaps the amount of money big oil threw into campaign coffers gives just a small hint of an answer. http://1bob6.blogspot.com/2008/07/transportation-ignorant.html
Social Security and Medicare. As a result of the Obama Care Law, despite lower near-term revenues resulting from the economic recession, the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund for Social Security and Medicare is now expected to remain solvent until 2029, twelve years longer than was projected in 2009. So why didn’t supporters of Obama Care boast about how it saved Medicare for another twelve years? Simple - candidates ran away from any of the benefits of Obama Care because they perceived it to be a campaign loser.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html
* Afraid to address the real issues
* Distorted the facts or
* Used canned phases that have little meaning, i.e., “Government is broken,” “We need to take back our country,” “Big government has run amuck” and “Our leaders have led the nation adrift: we need change now” ?????
There was one day of rolling in the election tsunami for tea partiers and Republicans. Now it’s payback time to the corporations that so lavishly funded those winners. It’s time to own up to the deceptive advertising that hoodwinked the electorate by saying the budget could be balanced by reducing taxes. It’s time to finally put something out there that replaces Obama Care and the financial reform law rather than just trying to repeal them. It’s time to get a comprehensive energy bill under the new Chairman of the House Energy Committee, Rep Joe Barton (R-Texas) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton, and immigration reform under the leadership of the new Chairman of the House Immigration Committee, Rep Steve King (R- Iowa) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_King. Obama will most assuredly be able to work with these two, along with the rest of the Republican House of Representatives - right? Here’s a clip that shows just how closely the two sides might work together -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#39998808
And for those of you out there fed a pack of lies by the folks you trusted in and voted for, here then are the hard core facts. Read it a weep.
The Shrinking Big Government. There have been no new federal programs started since 2009, nothing like the huge government expansion between 2000 and 2008 when non-military domestic expenditures set new records in growth. Welfare state spending increased 32%; public assistance increased 17%; housing assistance increased 12%; federal student loans increased 129%.; food and nutrition assistance increased 43%; social security increased 19%; and medical care increased 54% as result of the unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003. Currently there are no giant infrastructure projects under way and no huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor. Spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, have risen because there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help, and there have been substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions - although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. The total number of government workers in America has been falling in the last two years with government payrolls falling by more than 350,000 since January 2009. The small increase in federal employment (mainly defense and security) was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level. Obama Care has yet to kick in but when it does, we will still have a private health care system. Since 2009, we may have finally capped big government expansion. So how did the public become so convinced government was growing rather than shrinking? Does the disinformation coming from Fox News influence the entire American population?
http://www.aier.org/research/briefs/750-big-government-under-the-bush-administration
TARP and the Stimulus - Irresponsible Government or Savior? The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out banks under President George W. Bush in Oct 2008 was originally expected to cost the U.S. Government $356 billion, but wound up costing only $30 billion, significantly less than the taxpayers' cost of the S&L crisis costing U.S. tax payers $125 billion under W’s father in the late 1980s. Originally under TARP it was once feared the government would be holding companies like GM, AIG and Citigroup for several years, but those companies bought back most of the Treasury's stake and emerge from TARP within a year. And for the Recovery Act of 2009 and 2010 (the Stimulus Bill) under President Barak Obama; well it wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy and was not mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Stimulus Bill more than 40% came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments, with another chuck going to pay for unemployment insurance. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending. Luckily government spending did not surge, and in hind sight the Democratic Congress enacted a much smaller than needed stimulus package, but a stimulus that was better than none at all. Small as it was, the Obama stimulus and the Bush TARP actually save the U.S. from a similar 1929 crash. But because the size of the Federal Government was not increased (as FDR did during the Great Depression of ‘29) unemployment remained high. So why did people think these two programs were giveaways wilding increasing the federal debt when in fact the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit for the foreseeable future? http://1bob7.blogspot.com/2008/12/stimulus-package.html http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036
The Bipartisan Debt Commission. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was created in 2010 by President Barack Obama to come up with a plan to reduce our $13 trillion debt. Their solution - two thirds (2/3) will have to be covered with spending cuts and the other third (1/3) by increasing tax revenue. Democrats on the commission appear ready to accept a cap on discretionary spending -- similar to those that worked in the 1990s, a major across-the-board cut in all agencies. The discretionary budget (non-defense @ 24% and defense @ 16%) accounts for 40% of the federal budget with mandatory programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) being the other 60%. Republican commissioners, in turn, seem to be warming to the idea of eliminating tax loopholes, including mortgage and charitable deductions as a trade off for lower income tax rates.
* Democrats will have to swallow spending cuts to their beloved "discretionary" programs, i.e., alternative energy sources, agriculture, training, science, housing, transportation, education, and urban development.
* Republicans will have to accept modest increase in tax revenues coupled with much larger spending cuts. Yet ultra conservative Republicans and blue dog Democrats are rejecting anything that might be labeled a tax increase, even eliminating tax giveaways and loopholes. Paradoxically, they are going to be the obstacle blocking the way toward a shrunken government and a reduced debt.
* Both sides will have to accept cuts in defense spending. This may be the hardest area to tackle, but it is the one most out of control. Some candidates are actually pushing for more military spending with no one on the side of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who appears to be the lone ranger in trying to bring down military costs now in its 13th straight year of uninterrupted growth.
So why did candidates not talk about the findings and recommendations of the Bipartisan Debt Commission? Their hard work is virtually unknown to the electorate. Instead we heard candidates calling for tax reduction in order to deduce the debt. Why didn’t the electorate see through this shell game?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100106221.html
Taxes.
* The Freeloaders. The number of Americans who pay no taxes continues to increase. We are close to the point at which half of the population will not pay taxes for government benefits they receive. The recent growth in the number of non federal income tax payers started during the 1990s followed by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. First the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 expanded the earned income tax credit. The second change was the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 which created a $500 per-child tax credit for families earning less than $110,000. In 1990, there were 23.8 million non-payers, but as a result of these legislative changes, 2000 arrived with 32.5 million non-payers. That was a percentage increase of 36. Entering the 2000s with one in four tax filers owing nothing, the non-payers pool was supercharged by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003—especially by the doubling of the child credit to $1,000. By 2004, when the credit expansion was fully phased in, the number of non-payers increased by 10.5 million, a 32-percent jump in the space of four years. In tax year 2008, the major tax change that created a record number of non- payers was the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which included a tax rebate of $300 per person, $600 per couple. A family of four was eligible for a rebate of $1,200. These tax rebates boosted the number of non-payers to nearly 52 million, 19 million more than the number of non-payers in 2000 when President Bill Clinton left office. This represents a 58.6 percent increase in the number of non-payers in less than a decade. Federal taxes in 2009/10 were down for 98% of the people and the Bush tax cuts saw to it that 47 percent of US tax payers paid nothing at all. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0
So why didn’t the candidates focused on these freeloaders but rather on breaks needed for the wealthy. This was a political missed opportunity for many candidates.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/25962.html
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/10/the-2010-index-of-dependence-on-government
* Tax Cuts and Debt Go Hand-in-hand. After imposition of the Bush Tax Cuts in 2001 and 2003, the national debt doubled in the succeeding Bush years. His was the worst eight-year economic record of any modern president. Worse still, by 2007 the U.S. reached levels of income inequality not since 1929. And despite claims by President W. Bush that these tax cuts "meant people had more money in their pocket," our incomes dropped ominously after those tax cuts. So why did Americans buy into voodoo economics and believe in candidates who promised debt reduction and economic good times if only all of the Bush tax cuts could be extended? After all, what happened (and continues to happen) to the debt since enactment of the Bush Tax Cuts is not all that far in the past. http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/001985.htm
* Compared to the Rest of the Industrialized World, We’re actually Under-taxed.
The U.S. tax burden for all taxes a percentage of the GDP is 28.2%, and with the exception of Japan (which is one notch lower at 27%), the US is taxed less than the rest of the industrialized world, i.e., 49-50% - Denmark and Sweden; 43-47% - Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, and Norway; 39-42% - Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and UK; 36-38% - Czech Republic, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain; 33-35% - Barbados, Canada, Ireland, and Poland; and 30-31% - Australia and Switzerland. This is a real bargain considering our spending habits:
- Our defense spending accounts for 54% of the total National Budget. In comparison, the country that spends the second highest percent of their budget on defense is China at 6.3% (2009 budget).
- In no league with military spending but greatly more expensive than any other country is our cost to incarceration our citizens with more people in jail today (as a percentage of the population) than any other country. For example, incarceration rates in the United Kingdom are one fifth of those in the U.S, one ninth in Germany, and one twelfth in Japan. The cost of our prison system is $75 billion per year. Congress must bear responsibility for this cost after passing drug laws that have swelled prison populations by treating it as a crime rather than an addiction as most countries have done.
So why did some candidates scream that we are being taxed to death while keeping quiet on how to pay for our two unfunded wars, stationing of troops in friendly countries (70,000 in Germany for over six decades since World War II and 40,000 in South Korea for five decades since the Korean War); and a prison system loaded with drug offenders who could be in treatment programs rather than costing tax payers $20,000 a year per inmate?
http://geekpolitics.com/what-do-azerbaijan-djibouti-and-suriname-have-in-common
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content-hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=104.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer
Defense. We account for just under half of the world’s total military spending (46.5%) with China in second place at a distant 6.6%. The US has quit literally taken up the mantle of world protector while letting its economy slips into more and more trouble. Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in a vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica. The 2010 Military Budget, at $965 billion is 36% of the total $2.65 trillion National Budget and, considering veterans’ benefits and interest on the national debt created by military spending, it’s 54% of the total National Budget – over half. It has risen 76% between FY 2002 and 2010, and we are now in our 13th straight year of uninterrupted growth in the defense budget, an unprecedented rise in spending that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has rightly termed a “gusher.” But the Pentagon has carefully scatters bases and defense dollars in every Congressional district, making it difficult for legislators to curtail spending on their home turf. For example, when Gates proposed that DoD save money by closing the Joint Forces Command, a bureaucracy overloaded with government pencil pushers and private contractors charging exurbanite rates for war plans usually put away on dusty shelves, well the suggestion drew howls of protest from Virginia’s entire Congressional delegation, people who for the most part want to reduce our debt. So didn’t some candidates step up to the plate in strong support of Secretary Gates?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/06/less_is_more.html
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Issues/Budget-Impact/2010/10/08/Neocons-Talk-Deficit-but-Wont-Budge-on-Defense-Cuts.aspx
Security. As part of the defense budget, the explosive expansion of the intelligence community since 9/11 has been a huge success for that little ole man sitting somewhere in a mountain cave. Bin Laden most assuredly has been gloating over his victory by causing America to go paranoid with billions of dollars spent on building up a gargantuan and cumbersome security community that is being sucked under by its own bureaucratic quagmire. The costs to taxpayers are enormous. A Washington Post's two-year investigative report identified 118 federal contracts worth $745.5 billion (77% of the entire defense budget) that had significant waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, with 854,000 people holding top-secret security clearances. Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and has a budget of $6 billion. As for its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion. From the very beginning, security experts and even their own inspectors have been pointing to the absurdity of TSA's and DHS's spending patterns. Congress has fought back against the critics, repeatedly allocating money to unnecessary projects. So why didn’t some candidates stand up to this waste?
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control
Campaign Finance Reform. This midterm election campaigns have set new records in campaign contributions with no requirement to disclose donors based on a recent Supreme Court decision. Recipients will most assuredly be on the hook to pay back corporate donors with favorable legislation. Congress has talked about this for years doing little. So why didn’t candidates pledge to correct this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_in_the_United_States
Line Item Veto. Another cost saving issue that congress has talked about for years is the line item veto power given to the president, allowing the president to strike the “pork” from large appropriations bills. Yet congress keeps kicking the bucket down the road. So why didn’t candidates pledge to correct this?
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37711.html
Government is Creating Debt without a Clue to a Cost / Benefits Analysis. Government provides services to the public, some of which are cost effective, but when the services become overly expensive for the same services that could be provided at a fraction of the cost, well where are the politicians to blow the whistle? Case in point is the Norfolk light rail expansion through Virginia Beach. By building a prohibitively expensive light rail system that cannot manage low fares and maintain an efficient service, local government shows its worst side by digging us deep into debt. Thirty municipalities (including Richmond) took a look at their light rail options and chose Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)(light rail on tires) which came in at least 1/5 the cost of light rail with money left over to provide customer friendly benefits such as more frequent intervals between buses than light rail. Virginia Beach has funded a $6.6 million Virginia Beach Transit Extension Study (VBTES) with an Alternatives Analysis (AA) for BRT. Most folks don’t know about the study as politicians feel hell bent to sweep the study’s eventual recommendations under the rug while pushing the virtues of light rail, and even prematurely purchasing land for light rail construction ahead of what the study may deem best. Fiscally conservative candidates favor light rail for a system that will cost $20 per ride with the rider paying $2 and the tax payer making up the difference. The same may be said for the seventeen mile extension of the D.C. metro system (the Silver Line) to Dulles Airport now estimated to cost $6.6 billion. And to think, a 2000 study proposed BRT instead of rail using the already in-place dedicated Dulles Access Road for $287,300,000 or less than 5% of the cost of the current rail system now under construction. So why are fiscally conservative politicians so strongly in favor of this waste?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/15/AR2010091504927.html http://1bob1.blogspot.com/2008/05/brt.html
Reducing Health Care Insurance.
After passage of the new Affordable Health Care Reform Act, the price of premiums kept rising. The basic problem with Obama Care is that it added new levels of regulations and forced insurance companies to cover people they would not have covered in the past. While getting more people into the insurance pool was a good thing, it did not change the basic problem. Consumers do not know the prices of the services that they receive and sometimes pass on to insurers unnecessary procedures. The best way to get costs to go down is to make people aware of the prices that they pay for medical care. Another way is though wellness visits which is promoted through Obama Care. http://www.healthcare.gov
Nevertheless, the American Health Care Insurance industry has practically removed competition with a few giants sewing up most of the business. A public plan would rekindle completion and bring down costs. And contrary to criticism that a public option would force private insurers out of business, public and private plans have different competitive advantages and each plan would drive down costs for all.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/what-happened-to-a-public-health-plan
Even minus a government option (which Obama Care doesn’t have), the current federal health care law provides incentives for State Insurance Commissioner to negotiate more aggressively with providers to hold down health-care prices, and in 2014 states will be empowers to reject “unreasonable” rate increase requests by health insurers. In North Carolina, for example, the State Insurance Commissioner has already used the Obama Care law to roll back premium increases by 23 percent.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/28/barack-obama/obama-said-states-have-new-power-review-insurance-/
http://lincmad.blogspot.com/2010/10/full-transcript-of-obama-on-daily-show.html
We continue to look away from the rest of the world for a better health care model. The World Health Organization puts us at number 37. Would it not be prudent for our elected officials to look at some of these countries paying less and getting more? http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
Repealing Obama Care will be extremely difficult and defeat of the bill in the courts is a long shot. Therefore, politicians can either waste time in the next two years trying to repeal the law or try to make what’s already out there more affordable and better. So why did we hear only hostile attacks on Obama Care and no positive suggestions for a better system? The Republican solution is to provide a tax credit that can be applied towards the purchase of health insurance while keeping many of the new benefits that Americans like, but the GOP stance clearly does not create a solution. Simply leaving more money in the pocket of those who could actually use the tax credit will not put anywhere near enough healthy people back into the insurance pool. While this makes for a good election pitch that most Americans can understand, the idea will do little to nothing to insulate the American health care system from collapse if it is not made mandatory, which Obama Care does in 2014.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/22/can-obamacare-be-repealed
http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2010/09/01/the-ugly-truth-behind-america%E2%80%99s-objection-to-health-care-reform
The Food We Eat is Killing Us. The giants of the food industry continue to be largely unregulated with the high amounts of fructose corn syrup (a major player in the obesity epidemic), salt (a major player in heart attacks), and antibiotics in our meats and pesticides covering our fruits and vegetables (other killers). Americans are obsessed with nutrition yet our dietary health is poor. We’re the world champs in terms of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and the cancers linked to diet. We put warnings on cigarette packs but the food at McDonalds is more hazardous to our health. We need to change our priorities. So were the candidates silent on this vital health issue?
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/15/report-reduce-salt-fat-in-u-s-dietary-guidelines
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34614380/ns/health-infectious_diseases
http://food.change.org/blog/view/chemicals_are_killing_us
Energy. We imports 64% of our crude oil (much of it coming from terrorist sponsored nations) pushing our deficit to new heights and contributing to the selling of our country to the Chinese. At one twentieth of the world’s population, the US is using 20 million barrels of oil a day, 25% of the world's produced oil. That’s 60 times more oil usage per U.S. citizen than non-U.S. citizen. This could all be turned around by passage of two pieces of legislation now lingering in Congress. Since we are literally swimming in recent natural gas discoveries we could use natural gas for all of our energy needs becoming 100% energy independent. On April 05, 2009 Dan Boren (D-OK) introduced H.R. 1835, “the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act” (or “NAT GAS” Act), legislation that would provide incentives, mostly as tax credits, for gas-fueled vehicle production and overnight installation of natural gas filling stations. A year and a half later Congress still has not passed this legislation. Another fuel we produce right here in America is biofuel, non-eatable grasses and trees. To encourage biodiesel production, the federal government six years ago provided a biofuel tax incentive, but those incentives ran out at the end of 2009 because Congress failed to extent the credit, causing the fledgling U.S. biodiesel industry to suffer dearly. On Sep 16, 2010, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) attempted to add the renewal of the credit to a small business bill currently under consideration in the Senate, but his motion did not receive the necessary 67 votes. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, called Grassley’s motion another GOP proposal stunts meant to score political points. Thus big oil continues to hold Congress addicted to offshore oil. Why didn’t candidates pick up on this win-win issue? Perhaps the amount of money big oil threw into campaign coffers gives just a small hint of an answer. http://1bob6.blogspot.com/2008/07/transportation-ignorant.html
Social Security and Medicare. As a result of the Obama Care Law, despite lower near-term revenues resulting from the economic recession, the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund for Social Security and Medicare is now expected to remain solvent until 2029, twelve years longer than was projected in 2009. So why didn’t supporters of Obama Care boast about how it saved Medicare for another twelve years? Simple - candidates ran away from any of the benefits of Obama Care because they perceived it to be a campaign loser.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html
Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor
Sep 3, 2010. The "Restoring Honor Rally" was held Aug 28, 2010 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. by political activist and commentator Glenn Beck who wanted a day of divine intervention to "restore honor" to the nation.
Beck put a heavy religious cast on his remarks stating, "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness. A sinister and Godless other is trying to transform our country into something no longer recognizable as America.” So whom did Beck want his followers to blame for leading us away from God and for tarnishing our honor? Could it be…SATAN? Certainly not Obama! But then think again!
By suspicion, fear, resentment, and innuendo; Beck has been placing Obama into a type of Christianity he says Americans do not recognize. A day after the rally Beck was on Fox News saying Obama's religion was “Marxism disguised as religion. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.” But then a lot of Beck's followers believe Beck's religion is perverse. I say this not to criticize Mormonism. No good Christian has the right to hold in judgment whether or not his fellow man is or is not Christian or a good or bad one. And here’s the paradox; while many of Beck’s conservative Christian followers believe the Mormon denomination is non-Christian, they denounce Mitt Romney for being a Mormon while finding it totally appropriate for Mormon Beck to demonize Obama’s Christianity. Beck is not only wrong about Obama's religion but wrong to use religion to take him down. The Constitution says, "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
In Early March 2010 Beck called on Christians to leave their churches if they heard preaching about social or economic justice, saying they were code words for Communism and Nazism. In attacking churches that espouse social justice, Beck is actually encouraging Mormons (including himself) to leave their church. This actually fits right in with the teachings of his church in that the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, asked God which church he should join, and God the Father and Jesus Christ both appeared to him telling him not to join any of them as all Christian churches were wrong. Beck is one step away from condemning all Christian churches since there are probably a few that are not Communist or Nazi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12justice.html
While Beck's rally was primarily religious, his 9 Principles and 12 Values were right out of the Alcoholics Anonymous playbook, a 12-step program for addiction healing. And who is more familiar with this than Beck? His history of alcoholism and addiction is well documented. For him, his assertion "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness” grows not from creeping communism brought on by Obama, but by his addiction. Conspiracy theories and paranoia are not unfamiliar to those who have wrestled the demon alcohol, but to his great credit, Beck has skillfully morphed this into a $35 million per year demagoguery by playing on the fears, emotions, and prejudices of conservative Christians. In times of economic stress, demagoguery can easily take root in the fertile grounds of fear and hate, and no one more than Beck knows how to cultivate his crop of followers than by nourishing their minds with fighting, biting words to "take back the country." Jeff Schweitzer, former White House senior policy analyst and author, says “That any American would follow this megalomaniac is sad testimony to our poisonous decline. I weep for our country with clenched angered fists of frustration. We can be so much better than this.”
Demagogues generally put fear into the hearts and minds of their followers, and that is exactly what Beck does nonstop: “I love my country and I fear for it… the government wants to control every little bit of your life ....I am sick and tired of the progressives in this government trying to dictate how to raise your kids ..Here’s what you need to start doing: join the Tea Party - call Gold Line [Beck’s sponsor]…We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination…..There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America done through the guise of an election….The president is a Marxist who is setting up a class system….The government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state….The health-care bill is the beginning of reparations… I believe this guy [President Obama] is a racist with a deep-seated hatred of white people.” His followers just eat it all up without stopping once to think that maybe they should question some of his hate filled rhetoric.
Martin Luther King completed his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, exactly forty-seven years ago at the same "Restoring Honor Rally" location with "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Beck concluded his rally with a call for white people to reclaim the civil rights movement. He said, "Blacks don't own Martin Luther King." To the ears of his followers, this sounded more like taking back what’s rightfully theirs as that dream deeply rooted in the white American dream sang out, “Thank God Almighty, our Messiah is here to restore white Christian supremacy.”
Beck put a heavy religious cast on his remarks stating, "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness. A sinister and Godless other is trying to transform our country into something no longer recognizable as America.” So whom did Beck want his followers to blame for leading us away from God and for tarnishing our honor? Could it be…SATAN? Certainly not Obama! But then think again!
By suspicion, fear, resentment, and innuendo; Beck has been placing Obama into a type of Christianity he says Americans do not recognize. A day after the rally Beck was on Fox News saying Obama's religion was “Marxism disguised as religion. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.” But then a lot of Beck's followers believe Beck's religion is perverse. I say this not to criticize Mormonism. No good Christian has the right to hold in judgment whether or not his fellow man is or is not Christian or a good or bad one. And here’s the paradox; while many of Beck’s conservative Christian followers believe the Mormon denomination is non-Christian, they denounce Mitt Romney for being a Mormon while finding it totally appropriate for Mormon Beck to demonize Obama’s Christianity. Beck is not only wrong about Obama's religion but wrong to use religion to take him down. The Constitution says, "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
In Early March 2010 Beck called on Christians to leave their churches if they heard preaching about social or economic justice, saying they were code words for Communism and Nazism. In attacking churches that espouse social justice, Beck is actually encouraging Mormons (including himself) to leave their church. This actually fits right in with the teachings of his church in that the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, asked God which church he should join, and God the Father and Jesus Christ both appeared to him telling him not to join any of them as all Christian churches were wrong. Beck is one step away from condemning all Christian churches since there are probably a few that are not Communist or Nazi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12justice.html
While Beck's rally was primarily religious, his 9 Principles and 12 Values were right out of the Alcoholics Anonymous playbook, a 12-step program for addiction healing. And who is more familiar with this than Beck? His history of alcoholism and addiction is well documented. For him, his assertion "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness” grows not from creeping communism brought on by Obama, but by his addiction. Conspiracy theories and paranoia are not unfamiliar to those who have wrestled the demon alcohol, but to his great credit, Beck has skillfully morphed this into a $35 million per year demagoguery by playing on the fears, emotions, and prejudices of conservative Christians. In times of economic stress, demagoguery can easily take root in the fertile grounds of fear and hate, and no one more than Beck knows how to cultivate his crop of followers than by nourishing their minds with fighting, biting words to "take back the country." Jeff Schweitzer, former White House senior policy analyst and author, says “That any American would follow this megalomaniac is sad testimony to our poisonous decline. I weep for our country with clenched angered fists of frustration. We can be so much better than this.”
Demagogues generally put fear into the hearts and minds of their followers, and that is exactly what Beck does nonstop: “I love my country and I fear for it… the government wants to control every little bit of your life ....I am sick and tired of the progressives in this government trying to dictate how to raise your kids ..Here’s what you need to start doing: join the Tea Party - call Gold Line [Beck’s sponsor]…We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination…..There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America done through the guise of an election….The president is a Marxist who is setting up a class system….The government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state….The health-care bill is the beginning of reparations… I believe this guy [President Obama] is a racist with a deep-seated hatred of white people.” His followers just eat it all up without stopping once to think that maybe they should question some of his hate filled rhetoric.
Martin Luther King completed his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, exactly forty-seven years ago at the same "Restoring Honor Rally" location with "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Beck concluded his rally with a call for white people to reclaim the civil rights movement. He said, "Blacks don't own Martin Luther King." To the ears of his followers, this sounded more like taking back what’s rightfully theirs as that dream deeply rooted in the white American dream sang out, “Thank God Almighty, our Messiah is here to restore white Christian supremacy.”
Yellow Journalism
Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Yellow news is deceptive, biased, unprofessional, unethical, and often pot marked with outright lies. Techniques include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism in order to drive up profits.
A noted example of yellow journalism was William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Though the Journal’s sensationalist stories of Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality, Hearst’s paper was a major influence in starting the Spanish-American war in 1898. After the war Hearst turned to a hate campaign against President McKinley. On April 10, 1901, an editorial in the Journal declared, “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” On September 6, 1901, as a result of Journal attacks, Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot and killed President McKinley at Buffalo, New York’s Pan-American Exposition. The incident would haunt Hearst for the rest of his life and all but destroying his presidential ambitions.
Yellow journalism lived on, especially in big city tabloids adapting flashy techniques of yellow journalism, most notably the New York Daily News, founded in 1919.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Today Fox attracts an audience using the same methods employed by Hearst one hundred years ago. Using scare headlines for minor news items (such as ACORN) and exaggerated commentaries by so-called expert (such as in health care), Fox has managed to increase its market share and advertising revenues at the expense of a well informed public and legitimate news.
In separate actions, with the same results, Brooklyn District Attorney and California Attorney General blew the whistle on Fox for bringing down a minor nonprofit organization that served poor people, registered voters, and advocated higher minimum wages. In a relentless campaign against the Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Fox used deception and out rights lies to greatly increasing its viewer ship and advertising profits while putting ACORN out of business. Fox Conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe in September 2009 released on Fox selectively edited videos from a hidden camera that purported to show ACORN employees advising them, a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend, how to set a up a brothel with underage girls. They had made visits in 2009 to ACORN offices in Brooklyn; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; California and elsewhere. The videos created a political and media firestorm when they were released on Fox, adding to problems the organization was facing over allegations of voter-registration fraud and embezzlement. In September, Congress blocked previously approved funds from going to ACORN based primarily on O'Keefe’s investigative reporting. On March 1, 2010 Brooklyn District Attorney's Office released findings that ACORN employees caught on video did not commit a crime. Then on April 1, 2010 California Attorney General Jerry Brown issued a report stating that employees of ACORN did not break state laws. Attorney General Brown wrote: "Things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality....Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor." The investigations revealed that the tapes were doctored and that O'Keefe arrived at the office in khakis, shirt and tie, not pimp clothes. In an edited tape an ACORN employee looks like she is helping Giles to start a prostitution business. But the unedited tape shows O’Keefe and Giles inquiring about financing for subsidized housing, not pimping. The initial introductions were cut, and during the conversation O'Keefe drops the word “prostitution” to make it appear as though the conversation is about prostitution, not financing. Fox News went on to play this false story with wall to wall coverage on Hannity, Beck, and Fox and Friends. People thought they were getting straight up coverage about a corrupt organization, but in fact it turned out to be a dishonest political stunt that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the facts. Fox News did not tell its viewers that the tapes were heavily edited or that O’Keefe wasn’t dressed as a pimp at ACORN offices. Fox deceived viewers by having O’Keefe wear the pimp outfit on air. As a consequence ACORN was shut down on April 1, 2010. The motive behind Fox’s skullduggery was to kill an organization that registering poor black people who have been voting Democratic 90% of the time. Fox was hands down successful in their campaign to throw ACORN under the bus. Ironically ACORN had multiple problems and had become an ineffective organization. Ultimately there was no need for Fox to trump up accusations. Fox could have instead hammered ACORN on their actual dishonest dealings, but then that would not have been as profitable for Fox.
While Fox spent a great deal of air time in vilifying ACORN, a small non-profit agency that has taken a grand total of $53 million in tax payers’ money since 1994 (about $3.3 million a year) it is giving giant BP a pass by suggesting the Deep Water Horizon disaster was an unfortunate accident and primarily Obama’s fault. BP’s short cuts, intimidation of its employees if they reported safety violations, out of date emergency readiness plans, reporting false oil leak quantities, poorly maintained equipment, and lack of redundant shutoff equipment were glossed over in a relentless effort to blame Obama in every way possible for the disaster. Viewers never heard about BP’s negligent pattern that went back several years. They never heard about BP’s 2006 Alaskan Prudhoe Bay corroded pipe oil spill that cost the company $20 million in fines and a criminal citation; and they never heard about the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery fire and explosion where the company was found guilty for killing 15 workers and injuring 170. Why? Because BP is big business. Fox listeners have been told that poor BP, with its extremely deep pockets, could go bankrupt. On June 17, 2010 Rep Joe Barton (R- Texas) apologized to BP for Obama’s Chicago-style “shakedown” of the oil giant by forcing them to cough up $20 billion. Fox’s Stuart Varney quickly followed up with the false assertion that that Obama had moved to “seize a private company’s assets” and complained that the action was “Hugo Chavez-like.” Realizing this was a GOP gaffe and a gift to the Democrats, House Minority Leader John Boehner ordered him to recant and apologize, and he quickly did; but FOX didn't play the apology. So much for fair and balanced!
Everything uttered and done by President Obama is cast in an extremely negative way by Fox. So when Obama came out with his recent nuclear policy review statement that would limit the role of nuclear weapons and get rid of unprotected nuclear stockpiles, Fox annalists didn’t waste any time in demonizing Obama, accusing him of "undermining our national defense" with a "dangerous policy.” Fox’s Glenn Beck characterized his nuclear reduction policy statement by saying it was, "The most dangerous thing I think I've ever heard a president say." Fox’s Pamela Geller said, “Obama is removing nuclear defense at a time when Iran's devout mullah crazy is building their nuclear arsenal,” and Fox’s Sarah Palin said, “Only a leftist liberal would want to reduce nukes. It’s like a child in a playground who says 'punch me in the face, I'm not going to retaliate.'” But outside of the Fox bubble other Americans heard world wide praise for Obama’s position as leading to a safer planet. Legitimate news analysts compared Obama’s efforts closely with President Ronald Reagan who said, “we must go at the matter of realistically reducing… if not totally eliminating, nuclear weapons - the threat to the world. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth." (Ronald Reagan in his Second Inaugural Address on January 21, 1985). Reagan’s efforts were during a time of cold war tension with the threat of Soviet thermo-nuclear annihilation which greatly overshadowed today’s Iran and North Korea concerns. There are some issues that both liberals and conservatives agree with and nuclear disarmament happens to be one of them. Even if the US cut its nuclear arsenal drastically there would still be enough left to blow up any hostile nation. By hitting Obama in the area of nuclear weapons reduction, a subject that Ronald Reagan championed, and then getting Fox listeners to go forth armed with that as a “talking point” demonstrates Fox’s strong influence over its listeners.
Today a naïve public using Fox as their sole source of information have taken on a similar attitude people did back in the 1890’s under Hearst’s relentless drum beating for an unnecessary war and attacks on the President. Similarly Fox’s manipulative techniques have created an angry audience that could spill over into violent action. Listeners absorb the hatred and intolerance of the commentators, fueling desires for vicious responses that could led to another Presidential assassination. Fox has more than a little to do with the fact that President Obama receives more than 30 death threats a day, an unprecedented number.
Fair and balanced? Hardly! Fox is nothing more than a 24/7 Republican mouth piece using its network to try and bring Obama and fellow Democrats down using the same type of vicious attacks Hearst used against President McKinley 100 years ago. Fox is quick to justify its actions under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting. But this is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head. Ironically Fox champions Christian conscious people.
Fox addicted listeners are convinced by Fox that it is the only true legitimate source of news. However, Fox has gone off the deep end so frequently that some prominent conservatives are now speaking up. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a staunch conservative from Oklahoma urged his audience to "know what other people's thoughts are -- not just what I hear through a pipe channel."
Fox has a host of analysts who agitate their listeners. Take Glen Beck. On Mar 23, 2010 he suggested that the Obama administration was "coming after him" and may actually kill him. He has called Obama a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, and a non-US Citizen. Then there is Fox’s Sean Hannity who is actively fanning the flames of hostility by repeatedly proclaiming that a new revolutionary war is needed. On Dec 17, 2008 Media Matters awarded Hannity the “2008 Misinformer of the Year,” followed the next year by Beck who was awarded the “2009 Misinformer of the Year.”
More recently, Fox has gone against one particular religion. Some days after the 9/11 attack, President Bush visited an Islamic Center in Washington and stressed in a speech that Islam and terror could not be mentioned together because Islam is a religion of peace. But somehow Fox is again stoking racial fears about Islam. Fox calls the planned mosque near ground zero "a monument to the terrorists," a theme that is sure to sell lots of add space as it resonates with white Christian zealots.
What brings a democracy down is not the anarchists, not the socialists or the neo-Nazis; it’s the misinformed. The truth is out there, it’s up to people to get unfiltered facts so they can make up their own minds. Fox needs to start practicing what it preaches – “we report, you decide.”
See
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20001827-503544.html
A noted example of yellow journalism was William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Though the Journal’s sensationalist stories of Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality, Hearst’s paper was a major influence in starting the Spanish-American war in 1898. After the war Hearst turned to a hate campaign against President McKinley. On April 10, 1901, an editorial in the Journal declared, “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” On September 6, 1901, as a result of Journal attacks, Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot and killed President McKinley at Buffalo, New York’s Pan-American Exposition. The incident would haunt Hearst for the rest of his life and all but destroying his presidential ambitions.
Yellow journalism lived on, especially in big city tabloids adapting flashy techniques of yellow journalism, most notably the New York Daily News, founded in 1919.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Today Fox attracts an audience using the same methods employed by Hearst one hundred years ago. Using scare headlines for minor news items (such as ACORN) and exaggerated commentaries by so-called expert (such as in health care), Fox has managed to increase its market share and advertising revenues at the expense of a well informed public and legitimate news.
In separate actions, with the same results, Brooklyn District Attorney and California Attorney General blew the whistle on Fox for bringing down a minor nonprofit organization that served poor people, registered voters, and advocated higher minimum wages. In a relentless campaign against the Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Fox used deception and out rights lies to greatly increasing its viewer ship and advertising profits while putting ACORN out of business. Fox Conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe in September 2009 released on Fox selectively edited videos from a hidden camera that purported to show ACORN employees advising them, a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend, how to set a up a brothel with underage girls. They had made visits in 2009 to ACORN offices in Brooklyn; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; California and elsewhere. The videos created a political and media firestorm when they were released on Fox, adding to problems the organization was facing over allegations of voter-registration fraud and embezzlement. In September, Congress blocked previously approved funds from going to ACORN based primarily on O'Keefe’s investigative reporting. On March 1, 2010 Brooklyn District Attorney's Office released findings that ACORN employees caught on video did not commit a crime. Then on April 1, 2010 California Attorney General Jerry Brown issued a report stating that employees of ACORN did not break state laws. Attorney General Brown wrote: "Things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality....Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor." The investigations revealed that the tapes were doctored and that O'Keefe arrived at the office in khakis, shirt and tie, not pimp clothes. In an edited tape an ACORN employee looks like she is helping Giles to start a prostitution business. But the unedited tape shows O’Keefe and Giles inquiring about financing for subsidized housing, not pimping. The initial introductions were cut, and during the conversation O'Keefe drops the word “prostitution” to make it appear as though the conversation is about prostitution, not financing. Fox News went on to play this false story with wall to wall coverage on Hannity, Beck, and Fox and Friends. People thought they were getting straight up coverage about a corrupt organization, but in fact it turned out to be a dishonest political stunt that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the facts. Fox News did not tell its viewers that the tapes were heavily edited or that O’Keefe wasn’t dressed as a pimp at ACORN offices. Fox deceived viewers by having O’Keefe wear the pimp outfit on air. As a consequence ACORN was shut down on April 1, 2010. The motive behind Fox’s skullduggery was to kill an organization that registering poor black people who have been voting Democratic 90% of the time. Fox was hands down successful in their campaign to throw ACORN under the bus. Ironically ACORN had multiple problems and had become an ineffective organization. Ultimately there was no need for Fox to trump up accusations. Fox could have instead hammered ACORN on their actual dishonest dealings, but then that would not have been as profitable for Fox.
While Fox spent a great deal of air time in vilifying ACORN, a small non-profit agency that has taken a grand total of $53 million in tax payers’ money since 1994 (about $3.3 million a year) it is giving giant BP a pass by suggesting the Deep Water Horizon disaster was an unfortunate accident and primarily Obama’s fault. BP’s short cuts, intimidation of its employees if they reported safety violations, out of date emergency readiness plans, reporting false oil leak quantities, poorly maintained equipment, and lack of redundant shutoff equipment were glossed over in a relentless effort to blame Obama in every way possible for the disaster. Viewers never heard about BP’s negligent pattern that went back several years. They never heard about BP’s 2006 Alaskan Prudhoe Bay corroded pipe oil spill that cost the company $20 million in fines and a criminal citation; and they never heard about the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery fire and explosion where the company was found guilty for killing 15 workers and injuring 170. Why? Because BP is big business. Fox listeners have been told that poor BP, with its extremely deep pockets, could go bankrupt. On June 17, 2010 Rep Joe Barton (R- Texas) apologized to BP for Obama’s Chicago-style “shakedown” of the oil giant by forcing them to cough up $20 billion. Fox’s Stuart Varney quickly followed up with the false assertion that that Obama had moved to “seize a private company’s assets” and complained that the action was “Hugo Chavez-like.” Realizing this was a GOP gaffe and a gift to the Democrats, House Minority Leader John Boehner ordered him to recant and apologize, and he quickly did; but FOX didn't play the apology. So much for fair and balanced!
Everything uttered and done by President Obama is cast in an extremely negative way by Fox. So when Obama came out with his recent nuclear policy review statement that would limit the role of nuclear weapons and get rid of unprotected nuclear stockpiles, Fox annalists didn’t waste any time in demonizing Obama, accusing him of "undermining our national defense" with a "dangerous policy.” Fox’s Glenn Beck characterized his nuclear reduction policy statement by saying it was, "The most dangerous thing I think I've ever heard a president say." Fox’s Pamela Geller said, “Obama is removing nuclear defense at a time when Iran's devout mullah crazy is building their nuclear arsenal,” and Fox’s Sarah Palin said, “Only a leftist liberal would want to reduce nukes. It’s like a child in a playground who says 'punch me in the face, I'm not going to retaliate.'” But outside of the Fox bubble other Americans heard world wide praise for Obama’s position as leading to a safer planet. Legitimate news analysts compared Obama’s efforts closely with President Ronald Reagan who said, “we must go at the matter of realistically reducing… if not totally eliminating, nuclear weapons - the threat to the world. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth." (Ronald Reagan in his Second Inaugural Address on January 21, 1985). Reagan’s efforts were during a time of cold war tension with the threat of Soviet thermo-nuclear annihilation which greatly overshadowed today’s Iran and North Korea concerns. There are some issues that both liberals and conservatives agree with and nuclear disarmament happens to be one of them. Even if the US cut its nuclear arsenal drastically there would still be enough left to blow up any hostile nation. By hitting Obama in the area of nuclear weapons reduction, a subject that Ronald Reagan championed, and then getting Fox listeners to go forth armed with that as a “talking point” demonstrates Fox’s strong influence over its listeners.
Today a naïve public using Fox as their sole source of information have taken on a similar attitude people did back in the 1890’s under Hearst’s relentless drum beating for an unnecessary war and attacks on the President. Similarly Fox’s manipulative techniques have created an angry audience that could spill over into violent action. Listeners absorb the hatred and intolerance of the commentators, fueling desires for vicious responses that could led to another Presidential assassination. Fox has more than a little to do with the fact that President Obama receives more than 30 death threats a day, an unprecedented number.
Fair and balanced? Hardly! Fox is nothing more than a 24/7 Republican mouth piece using its network to try and bring Obama and fellow Democrats down using the same type of vicious attacks Hearst used against President McKinley 100 years ago. Fox is quick to justify its actions under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting. But this is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head. Ironically Fox champions Christian conscious people.
Fox addicted listeners are convinced by Fox that it is the only true legitimate source of news. However, Fox has gone off the deep end so frequently that some prominent conservatives are now speaking up. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a staunch conservative from Oklahoma urged his audience to "know what other people's thoughts are -- not just what I hear through a pipe channel."
Fox has a host of analysts who agitate their listeners. Take Glen Beck. On Mar 23, 2010 he suggested that the Obama administration was "coming after him" and may actually kill him. He has called Obama a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, and a non-US Citizen. Then there is Fox’s Sean Hannity who is actively fanning the flames of hostility by repeatedly proclaiming that a new revolutionary war is needed. On Dec 17, 2008 Media Matters awarded Hannity the “2008 Misinformer of the Year,” followed the next year by Beck who was awarded the “2009 Misinformer of the Year.”
More recently, Fox has gone against one particular religion. Some days after the 9/11 attack, President Bush visited an Islamic Center in Washington and stressed in a speech that Islam and terror could not be mentioned together because Islam is a religion of peace. But somehow Fox is again stoking racial fears about Islam. Fox calls the planned mosque near ground zero "a monument to the terrorists," a theme that is sure to sell lots of add space as it resonates with white Christian zealots.
What brings a democracy down is not the anarchists, not the socialists or the neo-Nazis; it’s the misinformed. The truth is out there, it’s up to people to get unfiltered facts so they can make up their own minds. Fox needs to start practicing what it preaches – “we report, you decide.”
See
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20001827-503544.html
PAYGO
July 30, 2010. In every other serious democracy outside the US, conservative political parties feel an obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. Remember Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with Americans Pay As You Go” or PAYGO? But that got in the way of supply-sided economics whose champions insisted taxes were too high, especially on the rich, and that a tax reduction would raise tax revenue – forget spending cuts. So how did America fair under cutting taxes without eliminating Government spending? Did the money really trickle down?
President Ronald Reagan signed tax cuts into law with the result that the national debt more than tripling (from $908 billion in 1980 to $3.2 trillion in 1990). Under Reagan total federal government outlays (in constant 2005 dollars) increased 22 percent and the Federal workforce grew by more than 60,000, all in peace time. Contrary to the myth floating around today, Reagan was not a fiscal conservative. He ranks among the top bureaucratic socialists of the 20th century.
President George W. Bush signed two major tax cuts into law; one in 2001 and one in 2003. Bush said these tax cuts would pay for themselves. Their cuts lowered everyone’s taxes, but they were skewed heavily to the wealthy. The Bush tax cuts were among the three biggest federal tax reductions since the end of World War II, comparable to the Reagan tax cut of 1981 and the Kennedy tax cut of the 1960s. Because the Bush tax cuts were expected to eventually cause huge deficits, Republicans wrote the law so they would expire in 2010. At the same time Bush went about creating the largest expansion of government ever recorded, expanding health care (passing an unfunded prescription drug benefit law that alone created $8.4 trillion in unfunded obligations in present value terms), education (increased DOE spending by 60%), defense (one trillion dollars for the war in Iraq), and etc. In eight years, President W. Bush increased the federal budget by a record 104 percent while failing to look for savings elsewhere in the budget. Taken together, his tax cuts and blotted bureaucracy increased the debt by almost $5 trillion. Interest on the debt (including both public and intra-governmental amounts) increased from $322 billion to $454 billion annually. Thanks to the Bush tax cuts the gaps in after-tax income between the richest one percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007. Under Bush the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
As a result of tax cuts, America is currently the lowest taxed country in the world with the exception of some oil rich countries. And as a result of this tax deficit hole being dug deeper every day, five Americans are now standing in line for each job opening. So what happened to this trickle down thing? And what happened to our debt? Is “supply sided” economics “voodoo" economics, and is it to be blamed? You betcha! The promise that reduction in tax rates would actually raise tax revenue never happened, neither in the Reagan nor the Bush years. Quite to the contrary, budget deficits exploded and private savings were swamped by these deficit increases.
Thanks to Republican Newt Gingrich’s PAYGO budget law from 1990 through 2002, America briefly experience economic prosperity and budget surpluses. When they expired President George W. Bush was at liberty to run up huge deficits, and he did without bothering to find budget tradeoffs for his tax cuts. Is PAYGO a relic of the past along with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with Americans?” Folks listening to Fox Republican News just somehow didn’t get the information – they never do. On Feb 12, 2010 (Lincoln’s Birthday) President Barack Obama signed pay-as-you-go budget legislation into law as one in a series of crucial steps needed to snap Washington out of a destructive pattern of overspending. In signing the legislation, Obama said, “Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else. After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do.” The new PAYGO legislation passed on a 233-187 vote in House and 60-39 in the Senate. No Republican voted for the bill. How strange! Perhaps they’re shell shocked from the Bush years.
As America heads into the fall election cycle, will Democratic plans to eliminate the Bush tax cuts resonate with voters who have lost houses and jobs? You betcha! In the face of stiff opposition from Republicans who blame Obama for record budget deficits, their logic is blowing a hole in Republican and Tea Party arguments that they're deficit hawks. They want to extend the Bush the tax cuts, adding more than $2 trillion over the next decade to the national debt, while President Obama wants to extend the cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and bring sanity back to America where the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. Republicans are still stuck in the mud with the same old tickle down argument thing saying tax cuts are critical to bolstering a feeble economic recovery. With twisted logic they use that rationale for tax cuts but not the stimulus package. Somehow, Republicans keep blaming Obama for the trillions of dollars the Bush tax cuts created; the very tax structure that helped led the US into recession. Reagan and Bush proved that tax cuts on the rich did not create jobs; they killed them.
With the help of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and company (those yellow pseudo-journalists) PAYGO has not crept back into our collective vernaculars. Many today still believe somehow by reducing taxes, without like spending cuts, that somehow, magically, money trees will sprout up and we’ll see huge surpluses. For those folks I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.
President Ronald Reagan signed tax cuts into law with the result that the national debt more than tripling (from $908 billion in 1980 to $3.2 trillion in 1990). Under Reagan total federal government outlays (in constant 2005 dollars) increased 22 percent and the Federal workforce grew by more than 60,000, all in peace time. Contrary to the myth floating around today, Reagan was not a fiscal conservative. He ranks among the top bureaucratic socialists of the 20th century.
President George W. Bush signed two major tax cuts into law; one in 2001 and one in 2003. Bush said these tax cuts would pay for themselves. Their cuts lowered everyone’s taxes, but they were skewed heavily to the wealthy. The Bush tax cuts were among the three biggest federal tax reductions since the end of World War II, comparable to the Reagan tax cut of 1981 and the Kennedy tax cut of the 1960s. Because the Bush tax cuts were expected to eventually cause huge deficits, Republicans wrote the law so they would expire in 2010. At the same time Bush went about creating the largest expansion of government ever recorded, expanding health care (passing an unfunded prescription drug benefit law that alone created $8.4 trillion in unfunded obligations in present value terms), education (increased DOE spending by 60%), defense (one trillion dollars for the war in Iraq), and etc. In eight years, President W. Bush increased the federal budget by a record 104 percent while failing to look for savings elsewhere in the budget. Taken together, his tax cuts and blotted bureaucracy increased the debt by almost $5 trillion. Interest on the debt (including both public and intra-governmental amounts) increased from $322 billion to $454 billion annually. Thanks to the Bush tax cuts the gaps in after-tax income between the richest one percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007. Under Bush the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
As a result of tax cuts, America is currently the lowest taxed country in the world with the exception of some oil rich countries. And as a result of this tax deficit hole being dug deeper every day, five Americans are now standing in line for each job opening. So what happened to this trickle down thing? And what happened to our debt? Is “supply sided” economics “voodoo" economics, and is it to be blamed? You betcha! The promise that reduction in tax rates would actually raise tax revenue never happened, neither in the Reagan nor the Bush years. Quite to the contrary, budget deficits exploded and private savings were swamped by these deficit increases.
Thanks to Republican Newt Gingrich’s PAYGO budget law from 1990 through 2002, America briefly experience economic prosperity and budget surpluses. When they expired President George W. Bush was at liberty to run up huge deficits, and he did without bothering to find budget tradeoffs for his tax cuts. Is PAYGO a relic of the past along with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with Americans?” Folks listening to Fox Republican News just somehow didn’t get the information – they never do. On Feb 12, 2010 (Lincoln’s Birthday) President Barack Obama signed pay-as-you-go budget legislation into law as one in a series of crucial steps needed to snap Washington out of a destructive pattern of overspending. In signing the legislation, Obama said, “Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else. After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do.” The new PAYGO legislation passed on a 233-187 vote in House and 60-39 in the Senate. No Republican voted for the bill. How strange! Perhaps they’re shell shocked from the Bush years.
As America heads into the fall election cycle, will Democratic plans to eliminate the Bush tax cuts resonate with voters who have lost houses and jobs? You betcha! In the face of stiff opposition from Republicans who blame Obama for record budget deficits, their logic is blowing a hole in Republican and Tea Party arguments that they're deficit hawks. They want to extend the Bush the tax cuts, adding more than $2 trillion over the next decade to the national debt, while President Obama wants to extend the cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and bring sanity back to America where the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. Republicans are still stuck in the mud with the same old tickle down argument thing saying tax cuts are critical to bolstering a feeble economic recovery. With twisted logic they use that rationale for tax cuts but not the stimulus package. Somehow, Republicans keep blaming Obama for the trillions of dollars the Bush tax cuts created; the very tax structure that helped led the US into recession. Reagan and Bush proved that tax cuts on the rich did not create jobs; they killed them.
With the help of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and company (those yellow pseudo-journalists) PAYGO has not crept back into our collective vernaculars. Many today still believe somehow by reducing taxes, without like spending cuts, that somehow, magically, money trees will sprout up and we’ll see huge surpluses. For those folks I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.
Cap and Trade
The “G.O.P. today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon.” (Thomas L. Friedman). Our President finally got it right, getting off this “electric mini car thing” by stating that we need to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks on big oil companies so we can tap natural-gas reserves as an alternative to coal. Obama went on to declare, "The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century." If only Democrats will capitalize on this the way they did 48 year ago with John F. Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the Moon” declaration (see http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/jfk-space.htm).
Republicans can not see the forest for the trees. Cap and Trade - a carbon tax (see http://www.carbontax.org/introduction) would push utility companies to see the economic benefits of modernizing coal fired power plants to natural gas. Yet we continue to build coal-fired power plants that are making our atmosphere dirtier each and every day (see http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/88709-bp-ceo-climate-bill-should-promote-natural-gas-industry) We worry about the BP Gulf oil spill making the water dirtier each and every day, yet the air we breath is getting dirtier each and every day (see http://healthandenergy.com/coal.htm and http://fuel-efficient-vehicles.org/energy-news/?p=495). Democrats need to make this a parallel argument to wake up an
A carbon tax will force utility companies to switch to natural gas, a product, thanks to recent discoveries, the
Republicans say there is no substitute for oil. They forgot that their own tribe has put forward the natural gas argument. Sarah Palin, Republican Vice Presidential candidate, was the one who proposed a natural gas pipeline through Canada to the lower forty-eight (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_gas_pipeline). And then there was Representatives John Peterson (R- Pennsylvania) who in the 2006 legislative session introduced the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Natural Gas Relief Act which would have allowed “natural gas only” leasing offshore (since oil is the primary environmental fear). The measure failed in the 2006 session and again in the 2008 session.
In 2008 President Bush and John McCain both had Big Oil’s interests at heart. Despite record profits and executive pay in the oil industry, neither Bush nor McCain were willing to cut back on Big Oil’s windfall profits and tax breaks provided in Bush’s Energy Policy Act of 2005. In 2008 McCain even proposed giving $3.8 billion more in tax breaks to Big Oil and voted to protect their profits despite big oil companies posting record earnings. Bush’s 2005 Energy Act has cost the U.S. Treasury tens of billions in lost revenue, and has led to a reckless search for oil in fragile environments like the deep floor of the
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2010/05/us_tax_breaks_favor_oil_indust.html
We have been so eager to get at our own oil that we blitzed over safeguards that could have prevented the Gulf oil spill; but greed, arrogance, and incompetence ruled the day. A manual acoustic shutoff switch could have stopped the flow but was not installed. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off
Democrats see big oil as the show stopper in promoting Senate energy and climate legislation where they don’t expect any cooperation from Republicans who are under toe by Big Oil. The strategy is similar to their successful handling of Wall Street reform in which they used aggressive tactics to pressure the GOP. They will make the energy debate a referendum on big oil companies and the nation’s dependence on oil. This will be a potent line of argument in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the
June 2, 2010 Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University - President Obama set out to channel public outrage about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill into support for a climate bill.Obama made one of his strongest pitches for comprehensive climate legislation, arguing that the case for breaking the nation's addiction to fossil fuels has been made clearer by the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. He vowed to gather votes for the climate bill in the coming months, and repeated his intention to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks on big oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development, to tap natural-gas reserves as an alternative to coal, and to increase reliance on nuclear power. Obama said. "The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century."
http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2010/jun/03/pitch-turns-focus-on-bill/news/
The U.S. is Swimming in Natural Gas. May 29, 2010 - Royal Dutch Shell has bought a privately owned US company for $4.7bn because recent technical breakthroughs in extracting natural gas from shale – sedimentary rock composed of mud, quartz and calcite – have changed the economics of the unconventional reserves, prompting a rush of interest from oil and gas companies.
Conservative columnists continue to take issue with “Global Warming” saying there is no scientific basis for it and that by imposing a “Cap and Trade” on carbon, liberals are trying to use it as a way to “control our lives.” Democrats need to stop trying to defend this warn out argument which has no room in the energy debate at hard – dirty, filthy air that is killing us! Cal Thomas is typical of beehive folks stirred up by Al Gore’s “Global Warming” doomsday prophecies.
Sinking ‘Climate Change’
Three modern myths have been sold to the American people: the promise of a transparent administration (President Obama); the promise of a more ethical Congress (Speaker Pelosi); and the myth of “global warming,” or climate change. The first two are daily proving suspect and now the third is sinking with greater force than melting icebergs, if they were melting, which many believe they are not. After spending years promoting “global warming,” the media are beginning to turn in the face of growing evidence that they have been wrong. The London Times recently reported: “
On the other hand Thomas L. Friedman makes the argument – “the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?” – a good argument that our President needs to hammer away at over and over on his bully pulpit along with that message for his daughter Malia, i.e., “The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century.”
Malia for President by Thomas L. Friedman, May 28, 2010
It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted: “When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in
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