NEON GODS

Elizabeth Warren: too dangrous to the right to let her win.

Dana Milbank writes about Elizabeth Warren in today's WaPost:

What was that about a Democratic "enthusiasm gap"?

Whichever pollster coined that phrase neglected to consult with the citizens converging this week on the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall here. They filled the parking lot, then the one next door, then the one across the street.

“I couldn’t contain myself when I heard she’d be here,” said Matt Szafranski, a blogger at the Springfield event.

“I’ve already donated twice, and I’m looking to go to a rally,” said Fran Miffitt, a retired nurse.

By the time the candidate arrived for the meeting – a prosaic organizing session for volunteers -- there were nearly 300 people crammed into Local 7 to catch a glimpse of her. When she took the stage, a sea of cameras and smartphones rose, as if at a rock concert.

All this for a law professor who specializes in contracts? But Elizabeth Warren, the former advisor to President Obama who is now trying to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown, is no mere professor, or candidate. She is a phenomenon.

Yes, she certainly is.  I can't believe how many of my friends are talking about her as if she was a savior sent from above.  "Warren for President in 2016,"  No, "Warren for President in 2012!"  Write in her name!

I admit, I get excited too when I listen to what she says and see how people react to her message.  She reminds me of Barack Obama when he was running for President, and that's why I'm a little nervous.  We got burned with Obama.  So let's be a little skeptical here folks, once elected and in office, politicians often change when they have to go crawling on bended knee before the wealthy, begging for money for the next big election.

But, here's what I wish the Democrats would recognize, the people out here in America are desperate for someone who is willing to fight for us!  Today's Democrats are so scared to fight hard for the middle class because they think it is a losing cause.  It ISN'T!   Imagine if there were 20 Elizabeth Warrens out here saying what Warren has been saying!  It would be a game changer. 

As it is, Warren is just one gutsy politician and the only way she is going to make a difference is if she wins big next year.  Because she's the only one saying what she's saying, the right is going to go all out to defeat her, and as long a there is only one voice they must silence (at any cost!), they will probably succeed.  That's why we need more like her, and soon. 

--Trakker

Gun owner shoots at kids getting out of school

You will be thrilled to know that yesterday afternoon a patriotic, law-abiding gun-owner used his firearm in self-defense against a bunch of thugs. 

Well, no, that's not what happened.  What really happened was that a gun owner, in fact, used his firearm to shoot at little boys and girls getting out of school.  Yes, these are the people the NRA works so hard to make sure no one hinders their ability to get their hands on a gun.

NEW YORK — Someone with a gun opened fire on a street as students were let out of school Friday afternoon, killing one parent who had tried to shield children from harm and injuring an 11-year-old girl and another parent, police and school officials said.

The shooting happened at about 2:30 p.m., ...

A 34-year-old woman, Zurana Horton, who had hovered over students to protect them as shots were fired, was struck in the face and chest and was pronounced dead at the scene. A 31-year-old woman was hit in an arm and the chest and was hospitalized.

Zurana Horton is the hero here, not the fictionalized law-abiding gun owner of NRA lore.  We're told these things wouldn't happen if everyone was armed and could shoot back at the bad guys.  Complete and utter bullshit.  That's right up there with the right wing's insistence that keeping taxes low on the wealthy creates jobs.

--Trakker

Why are Americans Angry?

Okay, lets play a game.  Two crimes, two punishments. Let's see if you can match the crime with the punishment.

Crime:

1. A CEO of one of the nation's largest privately held mortgage lenders was convicted for his role in one of the largest corporate frauds in U.S. history, estimated to be 3 Billion dollars.

2. A homeless man went into a bank and demanded money.  The teller handed over three stacks of money, but the robber took only $100 and gave the rest back.  A day later he felt bad for robbing the bank and turned himself in to the police.

Punishment:

1. 15 years in prison

2. 40 months in prison (3+ years)

I'm sure you saw this coming.  All you had to know was that one was a rich CEO and the other was a homeless man.  This is just another example of the life of privilege the 1% lead.  This is the kind of shit that the poor, especially, get bludgeoned with all the time in America.  This might explain in some small way, the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

I will be returning to Maryland this weekend and I hope to spend some time at the Occupy DC gathering next week.

--Trakker

Totally unprofessional behavior!

We own two cats. We feed them, give them shelter, buy them toys and catnip, provide them with free health care, and pet them when they demand it.  In return all we ask is that they keep our cabin free of mice when we're there.

I'm at the cabin for a few weeks and it's getting cold out at night so the mice are trying to move in.  But we've got two super-alert cats ready to pounce on any mouse that dares to show itself, right?  Right?

The other morning I got up and happened to glance in the kitchen and there was our cat, Skipper, laying on the kitchen counter right next to a little field mouse who was nibbling on some crumbs.  When the mouse was done it sauntered off and Skipper did nothing.  She just let it walk away (I grabbed a box, caught the mouse - see how easy it is Skipper? - and took it into the woods where I let it go).

But it gets worse.  The next day the cats cornered a different mouse (I hope), and they just chased it around the room.  They could have caught if they really wanted to.  They finally cornered it on our TV tray rack and the mouse actually ran down to Skipper and they touched noses!  That's when I grabbed my camera, to get proof of the unprofessional behavior of our cats.  You can watch the shocking video here (when the link opens, click on the image on the left).

Has the whole world gone insane?!  Herman Cain proposes to raise taxes on families making $50,000 by $4,500 a year and he is now the leading Republican candidate for President?  Dirty hippies are scaring wealthy Wall Street moguls?  Our cats are befriending mice?  What next, an African American gets elected President of the United States??  Oh,  wait...,

--Trakker

“They need to understand who their constituency is...”

From a very revealing NYTimes article Saturday in the Business section:

“Most people view [the Occupy Wall Street movement] as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager.

“It’s not a middle-class uprising,” adds another veteran bank executive. “It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”

Right (/sarcasm).  Ever since the 60's the right has characterized young people marching or demonstrating for a better world as a bunch of dirty hippies, and it seems to resonate in the heartland where criticism of America (from the left, mind you. It's okay if the right calls Democrats vile names) as traitorous.

However, it is true that those occupying Wall Street (and other cities in the U.S.) are the fringe.  For now.  But isn't that how big movements almost always begin?  The most angry and motivated make a lot of noise and it resonates with more and more people, and as more people join, it becomes less fringy and more focused.  I'm not sure if this movement will survive the winter months, but if they do, watch out this spring!

But lets look closer at what some on Wall Street are saying:

...people should show some gratitude. Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”

Doesn't this sound like a baron of old threatening their peons that if they don't stop complaining about the maggots in their gruel that maybe they won't get any gruel at all in the future?

[The money manager] added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. “They need to understand who their constituency is,” he said.

Whoa.  Senators Schumer and Gillibrand represent New York.  New York state has over 19 million people.  But this money manager seems to believe that the Senators only represent the few thousand New York bankers and money managers!  These assholes really do believe they are the only people in the country who matter!  Talk about entitled.

--Trakker

A crumbling nation.

A nation's prosperity depends on it's infrastructure.  Goods are shipped via their  highways, railroads, harbors, and airports.  Workers need good highways, bridges, and public transportation to get to work. 

Unfortunately, our infrastructure has been largely underfunded for decades and it is decaying.

The U.S. population is forecast to grow by 100 million — a 30 percent increase — before the middle of the 21st century. And right now a nationwide transportation system built in the middle of the 20th century is falling apart.

There isn’t enough money to arrest its decline, and the public is largely oblivious to the need.

That was the general consensus Friday at a transportation conference that heard from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood; ...

Although complaints about traffic congestion are commonplace, to the average consumer the transportation system appears to be working reasonably well. And, said several speakers at the conference hosted by Washington Post Live, the amount of money needed to restore and expand it is so enormous that few taxpayers can relate. ...

The American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that an investment of $1.7 trillion is needed between now and 2020 to rebuild roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the ends of their planned life cycles. ...

As Congress grapples with taming a massive deficit, just keeping transportation funding at current levels has been heralded as a triumph. Though neither house has made public a written proposal, the House has talked of allocating roughly $45 billion a year, while the Senate number is about $54 billion.

Assuming they split the difference, that $50 billion a year is just 3% of what is needed!  I suspect it will take more than that amount just to stay even with the decay.

Republicans keep beating the drum for smaller and smaller government.  They tell us government can't do anything right or cheaply, so we must starve the beast and we will all be better off without our "huge" tax burden.  Right.  Large companies like GE, that rely on our infrastructure to move their goods and employees pay almost nothing in taxes.  This is the Republican utopia, a crumbling, impoverished nation, BUT we will be able to brag about our ultralow taxes.

Contrast this to the left who points out that wages, materials, and money is dirt cheap right now so we could get a huge bang for our buck, plus put millions back to work, if we started a massive program to fix our infrastructure now.  It would benefit this country for decades to come. 

The Republicans refuse.  They don't want the government involved with anything but national defense.  They claim everything else can be run better and more cheaply if we just rely on capitalism and the free market system to make our lives better.  So I guess we'll just have to wait for GE and Google and Amazon to build us new sewers, fix our bridges, and upgrade our subways. 

"Real" Americans believe it's better to die than take any help from the government.

Follow this link and read what the pretty young girl has written in her notebook.  The author of the blog who re-posted her picture is aghast at this from her: “The cancer still grows. That is the American dream.” obviously assuming that the girl just doesn't see why we need better health care and better safety nets in this country so people like her father don't have to suffer, and might live longer.

I believe he's wrong.  From my many discussions with a certain kind of conservative, people like this are proud of their suffering.  Real Americans get cancer, suffer without complaint, and die, leaving behind a family, without taking a single handout from the government!  Just like Real Christians get cancer, suffer, see their businesses decline, live paycheck to paycheck, and never question a God that allows this while scumbags who cheat people out of their savings live long and well.  

Sorry liberals, you will never convince people like this that it is a good idea for everyone to pay a little bit more in taxes so that those unlucky enough to get cancer can relax, recover, and spend more of their life enjoying their family.

“The cancer still grows. That is the American dream.”  It's not my dream.

--Trakker

Harry Reid is finally pissed!  Here's his op-ed in today's WaPost:

At the beginning of this Congress, many of my Democratic colleagues wished to change the rules of the Senate to limit the minority party’s ability to kill important, job-creating legislation with arcane parliamentary maneuvers and needless delay. I opposed this rule change, believing we needed to preserve the right of the minority to offer amendments.

Rather than limiting those rights, we came to an understanding with Republicans, who agreed to respect the Senate’s tradition of conciliation in the interest of getting things done. They agreed to stop forcing procedural votes for the sake of slowing down legislation, and we agreed to preserve the minority party’s right to block bills when necessary.

Since then, Republicans have failed to abide by that agreement. Rather than working with Democrats to pass job-creating legislation, they have used procedural maneuvers to kill several common-sense bills — including a noncontroversial small-business loan program — that have previously passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. They have twice nearly shut down the government and forced our nation to the brink of default for the first time in its history.  [emphasis mine]

We now have two parties in America.  The Democrats are trying hard to keep our long tradition of governing by consensus and compromise.  The Republican party is determined to exclude anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.  They want a one party system, they want it all.  If the Senate needs to pass a bill, it will only be the one the Republicans approve of or it won't get done, the country be damned.  And yes, we are increasingly damned.  About half of the voters in America are Democrats, but the Republicans are working hard at disenfranchising every single one of us. 

--Trakker

Gerrymandering is wrong. Extreme gerrymandering is sickening.

The state of Maryland is a solidly blue state, but that is mostly due to the fact that the state is dominated, population-wise, by Baltimore city and it's suburbs plus the suburbs of Washington, DC.  Maryland has eight seats in the House of Representatives, six of them are held by Democrats.  That's a four-to-one ratio of Democratic seats to Republican seats.  That overstates the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the state.  In fact all the large western counties are solidly Republican, as are most counties on the eastern shore. 

But a 4-to-1 ratio isn't good enough for our Democratic Governor, Martin O'Malley.  He has plans to gerrymander the state so that seven or even all eight Congressional districts are majority Democratic districts!

No doubt this is in response to the Republican party's apparent policy of redistricting the Congressional districts in all the states they control to eliminate as many Democratic districts as possible.  Such a policy is breathtakingly undemocratic and wrong, but that's how Republicans keep their power.  That doesn't mean Democrats should stoop to that level.

I was happy to find another Maryland Democrat, Todd Eberly, who teaches at St. Mary's College, who agrees.

I happen to think that much of [Martin] O'Malley's criticism of the GOP and the Tea Party, though a bit hyperbolic, [is] often correct.

Unfortunately for O'Malley, recent events suggest that he is every bit as partisan and unconcerned with the health of our democracy as are the Republicans he so often criticizes.

As reported by the Washington Post, O'Malley's Redistricting Commission appears to have settled on two possible options for redrawing Maryland's congressional districts... Each map represents no less than an assault on the very concept of democratic representation. Each map represents an act of puerile political cowardice drawn for the express purpose of suppressing the will of the people in the state of Maryland.

With these maps Governor O'Malley appears ready to embrace divisiveness and political gamesmanship with one goal and one goal only and that is to help Democrats reclaim the House of Representatives in 2012 - even if it means effectively disenfranchising four in ten Marylanders and risking our country's future by exacerbating the problem of polarized politics.

Simply stated, the O'Malley plans (as reported by the Washington Post) seek to alter Maryland's current Congressional delegation of six Democrats and two Republicans and create a delegation that is seven Democrats to one Republican, or, under a particularly egregious plan, eight Democrats.

Maryland Republicans are people and American citizens too, and they make up about 40% of the state.  They deserve a voice and representation in Congress, and when you stomp all over their rights you silence their voice, and they often withdraw from politics altogether, or become angry tea partiers.

This extreme gerrymandering is wrong and as a Maryland citizen, I strongly oppose it.

--Trakker

Newt Gingrich: Presidents can ignore Supreme Court rulings they disagree with.

What is it about conservatives that make them hate our system of government?  We have Rick Perry, as governor of Texas, threaten to secede if the federal government (i.e, "the people" of "We, the people...") tries to make Texas do things he doesn't agree with, and now we have Newt Gingrich tell us that if he is elected President he will ignore Supreme Court rulings if he disagrees with them!

Appealing to conservatives wary of the court system, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Friday not only called for reforming the judicial branch, but he also said he'd ignore the Supreme Court if he fundamentally disagreed with them.

"This modern model is just totally opposite the American tradition," Gingrich said of the judicial branch at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, a conference organized by the conservative Family Research Council Action.

...Gingrich said, "one of the major reasons I am running" for president is the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' 2002 ruling that the phrase "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional. The ruling was later overturned.

Gingrich slammed a handful of cases he considered judicial overreach, such as the California Proposition 8 ruling, which he said amounted to "one judge in California deciding he knows more than 8 million Californians about the definition of marriage." He called out a U.S. District judge who this year banned formal prayers at a San Antonio high school graduation, saying Congress should hold hearings on the matter.

"On the issue of God and American public life, the courts have been historically wrong at least since the 1940s," Gingrich said.

Hmmm.  I was taught in my Baptist Sunday School that the Christian God was really, really powerful, that he essentially ruled the world...and yet he hasn't been able to make the American courts shape up and respect him for over 70 years?  And you people still worship him? 

But I digress.  It has generally been accepted in America that we consent to abide by the rules (laws) made by the elected representatives of all the citizens.  Some of these rules may seem silly, stupid, or even grossly unfair, but our government provides many avenues for overturning or modifying laws you disagree with.  Ignoring them is certainly one avenue, but of course there are major consequences: arrest, dismissal, or impeachment for example.  These are pretty drastic and that is why ignoring laws and rulings is usually stupid.  For a person running for President of the United States to pledge to ignore all court rulings he fundamentally disagrees with is admitting he will almost certainly be impeached down the road.  I guess he fancies himself a martyr for God.  Just remember, Gingrich was once the Speaker of the House, he had his picture on the cover of all the news magazines, he was considered an intellectual.  He's been married three times, divorced twice, and rages about how gays are trying to sully marriage in America! 

How about this?  If the Republicans take the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, we pledge to ignore any laws they pass that we fundamentally disagree with.

--Trakker