Hop on over to Talking Points Memo and start reading. The financial lobbyists, you know, the same kind as the crew that’s running Crazy John McCain’s (the “Regulating Deregulator”) campaign, are already pushing to screw the taxpayers and make themselves a pile of money.
That’s the Republican way, baby. They’ll take care of their fat asses by emptying your wallet for the next two generations.
McCain’s got no class, none at all.
There’s a YouTube video here of him walking on the bones of the dead to get to the White House. Watch it if you can stand the little hypocritical piece of sleaze.
He’s waving around a dead man’s dog tags to garner votes.
This is the guy who wants the United States to stay at war for a hundred years or so, and who couldn’t tell you what the war was about or who or why, or even where, and he’s waving a dead sergeant’s dog tags to make political points.
If he had any class he’d have thanked the soldier’s mother for them, put them in his pocket and never mentioned them in public.
A new low, even for McCain, who’s been sucking up sewer water for months and spitting it all over the electorate.
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
- John McCain, 2008
So the financial bigwigs got greedy, assumed that their ethics had been deregulated by all those Republican and Conservative politicians they bought, and now, when their ass is being handed to them by the free market so beloved by those same Republicans, want the government to bail them out, save their mansions, protect their fancy cars?
Oh, sure, okay. Here’s the deal.
The United States government, no, make that the Bush Administration of the United States Government, which is different from the government of, by, and for the people, wants to take the people’s money, hundreds of billions of dollars of it, to buy worthless securities from these companies that have gamed the system and with this deal continue to game it. Apparently the Bush Government will have to borrow the money, or maybe they’ll just print some, both options which will, of course, be really really good for the economy.
The Government will hold onto these worthless securities until the market ‘stabilizes’ and they can then sell them.
We know the securities and other items involved in this crime are worthless, because if they were worth anything there wouldn’t be a problem.
Let’s simplify.
You own a hamburger palace. Monday morning you come to work and discover that all your hamburgers and all your condiments are contaminated with hepatitis. Woe is you for you shall be bankrupt.
But your Uncle Sammy, out of the goodness of his heart, decides to borrow a lot of money to buy all your diseased stock, thinking perhaps he can sell it next week to some unsuspecting third world country, perhaps, where some fools have never heard of hepatitis.
So you get to keep your business as though nothing has happened, and Uncle Sammy goes deeper into debt, so deep that the only thing he can see now is the ceiling above the toilet as his company and life swirl down the pipe.
Bottom line – the taxpayer is being screwed again by the big boys and their Republican friends and Democratic enablers, all the result of Republican idiot ideology that took away the regulations and the rules and the systems that kept the greedy bastards from screwing you before.
And John McCain, who took money from Francis Keating to queer the regulatory investigation into the savings and loan scandal, who has the principles and ethics of a Wall Street shark, was one of the biggest deregulators in Washington, along with his friend and close economic adviser, Phil Gramm, who brought Enron to the grandmothers of California.
There is one sure thing in all of this, and that’s that the people who built this mess, the politicians, the brokers, the hedge fund billionaires, the financial ‘geniuses’, none of them will pay a price. They won’t lose their homes, their cars, their jobs. They won’t be charged with crimes, they won’t do time. They’ll just move on to the next scam, buoyed with the knowledge that their friends in Washington will probably bail them out again. And again. And again. That’s how the Republican free market works. That’s the Republican way.
Here’s a piece at Common Dreams from the Independent/UK on the National Organization For Women’s rejection of Sarah Palin and John McBush…Cain.
A little sample:
Another Wasilla resident, Phil Munger, a music composer and teacher, says she pushed an evangelical agenda in the town. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the [school] board. I bumped into her after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God [a church]. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism – your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’ I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
She might well have seen such a thing. They were fakes created by creationists, you know, Christians who will lie, cheat, steal, kill, deceive, do whatever is necessary to prove that their narrow, ugly little view of the world is the only right one.
And finally there’s this:
Mr Munger also asked Mrs Palin if she believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime’.”
Just when the United States and the world need American leaders grounded in reality, in facts, in evidence, in the real world, the Republicans offer us a delusional, whacked-out freak who lies, abuses political power, lies, believes falsehoods, lies, and thinks Armageddon is a real battle that is supposed to set the world right.
Thanks for thinking of country first, Johnny Bomb Bomb.
And thanks to NOW for rejecting a Republican trash ticket.
The Globe today, in a story by James Vaznis, reports that twenty percent of high school sophomores failed some portion of the MCAS tests, for the taking of which the students have been highly trained. (The Lion suggests that their training has come at the expense of their education.)
The numerical breakdown shows that seventeen percent failed the science portion of the test, remarkably close to the twenty percent of Americans who believe that the sun revolves around the earth.
Yup, can’t hardly wait for Palin and McBush to get creationism into those science classes in the most advanced civilization in the world.
From a 2006 essay titled ‘History and National Stupidity’ by Arthur Schlesinger, quoted in Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason:
Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity – the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat – fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which we knew nothing . . . Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity.
In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. History is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is always in the making. Let historians not forsake the quest for knowledge, however tricky and full of problems that quest may be, in the interests of an ideology, a nation, a race, a sex, or a cause. The great strength of the practice of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction.
Of course, it would help if Americans would actually read history, instead of getting it in predigested chunks in Rambo movies and the History Channel. It would help if Americans actually were taught to think in school instead of just to fill in the multiple-choice answers that pass for educational assessment these days. It would help if the media acted as if they actually had a responsibility to the country, to the citizenry, instead of to shareholders who don’t give a damn about either the media or the country.
But that’s asking too much these days. The Republicans put forth two world-class liars and hypocrites to lead the nation into the future, and they are applauded for the trivia of their lives and minds instead of examined for their substance. We are beyond national stupidity, and are well into delusion and psychosis.
Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, a populist leader, is trying to hold his country together in the face of growing violence and opposition from the moneyed provinces, as reported by the AP in today’s Globe.
Morales accused the United States of fomenting, aiding and abetting, and inciting the violence. Given the United States’ brutal history in South America, he’s making a reasonable assumption.
The U.S. Ambassador, Philip Goldberg, whom Morales has kicked out, denied having a hand in the opposition and the violence.
“I would like to say that all the accusations made against me, against the embassy and against my nation are completely false and unjustified,” he told reporters. “I have nothing to say to those who misinterpreted my actions.”
Sounds like an admission of guilt.
Goldberg is a representative of the Bush administration, comprising liars, cheats, and psychopaths, the same administration that a couple of years ago fomented a coup in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez, and which is in the same line of arrogant killers (Henry Kissinger et al) who overthrew the freely elected government of Allende in Chile and got thousands of Chileans killed.
Goldberg can protest all he wants. He has no credibility to work with. The McBush government prefers violence and bloodshed as the primary tool of its so-called diplomacy against weak third-world countries. There’s no reason to think they are applying a different set of tools in Bolivia.
The Democrats have caved in (standard operating procedure) on the issue of offshore drilling. The Republican wingnuts win again, and nobody can bear to point out the flaws in the ointment they use for their brains.
The problem is not that the United States depends on foreign oil. The problem is not energy independence.
The problem is that the more oil and gas we bring out of the ground and put into the atmosphere, the closer we drive the planet’s biosphere (that’s us, too) to extinction.
There’s no mystery here. There’s no legitimate debate. The laws of physics and biology apply, and they are ruthless and they will not bargain, they will not compromise, and they do not care. Keep pumping greenhouse gasses into the biosphere and most or all life will die. It’s already begun.
But the assholes the Americans put into office still think they can talk their way out of it. And the assholes who put them into office are poised to put into the White House two people who will accelerate the process of killing us all, McCain and Palin.
Liar and hypocrite John McCain visited a NASCAR race in Loudon, NH yesterday, where he was apparently warmly welcomed by hordes of the rabid who have breathed far too many fumes.
Makes sense. Watching cars go round and round and round in circles for two or three hours pretty much sums up McCain.
Same lies over and over. Same refusal to actually think about anything, just go round and round and round with the same old crap. And at the end stick a good looking broad up there on the platform and declare victory.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, a Bush propagandist, claims ‘We’ve turned the tide’ in the No Child Left Behind sea of bullshit.
Yes, we have, Margie. We now have more kids now who have been taught to become capable test takers. They don’t know much. They can’t spell any better. They certainly can’t write any better. They are outperformed by most students from other countries in science and math. But boy can they take those standardized tests!
Spellings blows smoke out of her ass in a whole column on page A10.
On page A2 is a little blurb from the AP mentioning a new study that found that one-third of American college students “have not been adequately prepared in high school and have to enroll in remedial classes.”
There’s a good op-ed piece in the Globe on the Republican Party Platform’s virulent and absolute, if subtly expressed, opposition to stem cell research.
The sick whackogelicals are still running the Republican Party. And of course they’re bringing us Sarah Palin, whose healthcare motto might well be ‘Hey, if you can’t stand the disease, die.’
Sarah Palin made a call this week to the Rev. Rick Warren, a guy who makes a lot of money pimping his religious books to the gullible and who hosted a shabby ‘faith’ forum last month for Senators McCain and Obama, for which McCain apparently got the questions before his appearance, while Obama had to make do with honesty.
From today’s Globe:
“Well actually she called me yesterday,” Warren said. “The question I asked her was, ‘How can I pray for you?’ ”
Warren said that Palin then “asked me to send her some bible verses on how do you deal with the unfair, unjust attacks and the mean-spirited criticism that comes in.”
This from the woman not only manifestly unqualified to lead the country, but who has done her fair share of heavy lifting in spreading unfair, unjust, and mean-spirited attacks on Senator Obama.
So let’s see, she’s a liar, she’s a hypocrite, she’s ignorant, she’s arrogant, and she’s a whiner. Definitely a good choice for the Republican Party. She perfectly exemplifies the Republican way.
