Now I know how Gregor Samsa must have felt.
It’s a terrible thing, waking up in the morning to realize that overnight you have metamorphosed into a conservative. How do you face your family?
I was shocked…shocked, to realize suddenly that I hate entitlements. It’s conservatives who preach against entitlements, right?
But there’s Boeing — feeling entitled to the $40 billion refueling tanker deal? They’re running full-page ads saying it’s not fair they didn’t get it.
And Billary is entitled to the White House?
John McCain is entitled to a free pass?
Stanley O’Neal steered Merrill Lynch into $27 billion in writedowns, and he’s entitled to a $160 million golden parachute?
James Cayne piloted Bear Stearns down from $170 a share to $2 a share, so he’s entitled to walk away with $40 million cash compensation plus $60 million more from selling his stock? That entitles him to a $26 million apartment in the Plaza.
And then the Fed arranges a Bear Stearns rescue, so you and I are entitled to pay for the whole mess with our tax dollars – even though the shareholders already paid for it with losses. That entitlement is so good we pay for it twice.
Logging companies are entitled to cut-rate leases for decimating old growth timber on Federal parklands?
Oil and gas companies are entitled to very cut-rate drilling leases? And then the oil company stooges in the Bush Bureau of Land Management forget to collect even that pittance?
Hedge fund managers are entitled to count billions of dollars of income as capital gains so that they can pay a lower tax rate than your mailman?
And conservatives are still entitled to wail in pious outrage against entitlements?
They cheat people who really need welfare, and then they turn out to be the biggest (and least deserving) welfare recipients of all.
I just looked again. I haven’t turned into Kafka’s cockroach after all.
They have.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Pigs like the smell of pigs. E Coli are determined to take over the digestive tract. And insiders think insiders should run everything.
Insider and one-time superdelegate Geraldine Ferraro (a Clinton campaigner) thinks that Democratic insiders should be able to pick the party’s nominee. That, in fact, is the subhead of her Op-Ed piece in Monday’s New York Times.
Superdelegates, she says, “were created to lead, not to follow. They were, and are, expected to determine what is best for our party and best for the country. I would hope that is why many superdelegates have already chosen a candidate to support.”
Well, that’s one reason, Geraldine. Another reason is money. The Center for Responsive Politics just issued a report on campaign contributions made to superdelegates (most of whom are sitting congressmen) by the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Their conclusion:
“Campaign contributions have been a generally reliable predictor of whose side a superdelegate will take.”
Is that your idea of leadership, Geraldine? To follow the money? Weren’t you once censured on campaign finances by the House Ethics Committee?
Geraldine also thinks the superdelegates should decide to seat the “delegates” from the non-elections in Florida and Michigan. Presumably, for the right price they very well might do that.
That would make Harold Ickes happy. He’s the Clinton campaign strategist who said last week in a conference call with reporters that superdelegates are more in touch with the issues important to voters than the voters are. Amazing. Then why hold primaries?
Just who are these supernatural beings who always know what’s best and who know the voters’ minds better than the voters themselves?
Could they possibly be the same Democratic congress people who have spent the last seven years kowtowing to George Bush, cowering in the corners and giving him every ugly, ignorant, arrogant, unconstitutional perversion of government power his tantrums demand?
Is it their all-knowing wisdom that has kept on playing patsy to Bush even after 70% of the voters in America had come to realize that this man and his administration are a comprehensive disaster?
These are our super-leaders, who can’t win a fight or defend a principle even when they have control of Congress and the president’s approval rating is 28%?
Go back where you came from, Geraldine.
You are part and parcel of the dirty laundry that Obama is promising to change and that Democratic voters are rejecting by overwhelming margins.
Ornithologists have discovered that bird brains have a closely integrated complex of two billion motor neurons controlling the bird’s left wing in steering, gliding, and maneuvering.
The right wing, however, is controlled by a mere 38 motor neurons, used only in bullying smaller birds, diving to kill something, or stealing food.
The surprising discovery was made while investigating the reasons why right-wing dominant birds behaved so abominably that only dodo birds, gooney birds, and loons would associate with them.
The disorder has been named Right Wing Syndrome. In humans, its apparent cause is a genetic reversion of certain neuronal clusters to more primitive pathways deep in the reptilian brain. This shuts off normal supplies of stem cells which would otherwise assist in restoring intellectual development. It often leads to repressed homosexuality and, in extreme cases, a catatonic refusal to think at all, which narcissistic victims tend to glorify as religious fervor.
The ornithologists collaborated with a group of MIT neuroscientists who had earlier discovered that conservatives lack the usual complement of mirror neurons in the pre-motor cortex. Mirror neurons provide meta-conscious awareness that gives normal human beings a warning signal when what they’re about to do might appear to others as laughably stupid.
The findings were presented at an NIH symposium in Cleveland on diseases endemic to creationists and Southern Baptists. Though generally well received, they were vehemently disputed by a team from the Joy Buzzer Laboratory at Bob Jones University and by Garland Roy Trotter of the Pat Robertson Institute of Degenerate Science.
“Professor” Trotter asserted that genetics is just a theory and that motors don’t have neurons anyway.
If you’re one of the three million highest-income Americans, congratulations. You’re assured of three square meals a day and money left over to do something significant.
How about adopting 50 children?
Your household will still have more income per person than the bottom 20% of the population lives on, so your expanded family can have its 156 square meals a day and still have money to burn at Wal-Mart.
It’s nice to be rich because, among other things, wealth gives you power. The affluent are also the people who make the rules. So you not only have most of the money, you also have the power to take the rest of it. (“If those people haven’t been smart enough or industrious enough to get rich, well, to hell with them. Let that be a lesson.”)
Might Makes Right
If a mugger approaches you with a knife or a gun, he has the power to take your money. He was smart enough to come armed, and you weren’t – so tough apples; fork over. If there are people standing around who criticize his morals, he can shoot them, too. What good is power if you don’t use it?
You don’t like Mugger Economics? Watch it. You’ll sound like a liberal.
In 2003, George Bush and a gleeful Republican congress gave major tax cuts to the nation’s multi-millionaires and modest tax cuts to the rest of us – all of it from borrowed money, which you now owe. In the next two years, individual incomes for the top 1% rose an average of $465,000 a year (nice raise!). In the bottom 20%, incomes were up $200.
Mugged again.
What a spectacle. With great fanfare, the richest people in America cut taxes for the richest people in America and congratulated each other as network television crews dutifully celebrated the presidential signing as if it were a tax cut for one and all. Thus we got the answer to a question the news media never ask:
What Do Conservatives Conserve?
Not the environment, certainly. Not the constitution. Not peace in the world or America’s standing among nations. Not traditional American values, which include fairness, honesty, truthfulness, and faithfulness to one’s sacred oath of office. No, what conservatives have been working to conserve are their own money, their power, and their presumptive right to control the lives of the less lavishly endowed. That’s why they bought the government.
So let’s not hang around waiting for fairness from the federal government. What about our public officials closer to home — in city, county, and state jurisdictions? Prof. Susan Pace Hamill at the University of Alabama Law School addresses that question in her new book, As Certain as Death. In her home state, she found that the poorest fifth of Alabama families – with incomes under $13,000 – pay state and local taxes that take almost 11 cents out of every dollar. The richest 1 percent, who make $229,000 or more, pay less than 4 cents out of each dollar they earn.
The Sinful Six
This is not coming from some firebrand liberal activist. In addition to her law degree, Dr. Hamill holds a degree in divinity from a conservative evangelical seminary. “The bible commands that the law promote justice,” she points out. Surveying all 50 states, she calls Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas “the sinful six” (that’s something like an axis of evil) because they soak the poor with heavy taxes and spend very little public money to help them.
Nationwide, thanks to the Bush tax cuts, the top 1 percent of incomes saw their tax rates drop from 20.4% to 19.2% between 2003 and 2005. Meanwhile, their incomes rose 42.6%, adjusted for inflation. Incomes for the middle fifth of all taxpayers rose 4.3% and for the bottom fifth 1.3%
That’s Mugger Economics
Result: by 2005 (latest year for which we have figures) the top 10 percent and top 1 percent were raking in their greatest share of total U.S. incomes since 1928 and 1929.
And we all know what happened after 1929.
___________
Data sources: the Congressional Budget Office; the Internal Revenue Service
Could Laura Bush be furtively grooming herself?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Chimpanzees groom each other, but Laura’s chimp has been too busy covering his tracks and posing for imaginary sculptors to worry about Laura’s future.
For all his foibles, Bill Clinton made room in the White House for Hillary to build her credentials, and then he was ready to pitch in and campaign when it was her turn to be president.
As glory-hog in chief, W has no time for that. So if Laura wants to follow Hillary as president (you know – Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, Bush…), she has to fatten up her resume on her own. This week she’s in the Middle East, supposedly on women’s health issues, but she’s also calling on the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and high officials in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In September, she invited female members of the White House press corps to lunch, a tour of renovations, and a huddle on No Child Left Behind and why it’s all right that the Republicans are leaving so many children behind. She’s also taken up the issue of Myanmar — where finger-pointing is so much easier than in Iraq — threw a formal dinner for the queen of England, and went to Egypt to praise the government on its support of democratic principles (viable candidates have to display a sense of humor).
Friends and Washington reporters say it’s ridiculous to think that Laura would ever seek the presidency, but these are the same people who couldn’t see how ridiculous her husband was.
Fair is fair. After the next Clinton, it’s the Bushes’ turn, and we certainly don’t want Jeb to come in and screw up the country so badly that Chelsey won’t be able to fix it.
From 2001 to 2006 the average taxpayer got tax cuts totaling $3,593 (you got less) while their share of the national debt increased by $13,000. The reason you got less than average is that the average is inflated by the inclusion of the $236,000 average tax break given to the top one percent of incomes. (Data from the Congressional Budget Office)
Even accepting the average as valid, you owe $3.62 for every dollar you saved on taxes. The richest one percent, meanwhile, owe less than six cents on each dollar of tax savings. For their average tax break of $236,000, each one owes $13,000 more toward the national debt (Later, they’ll figure out how to get out of paying that, too.). The other $223,000 is free and clear – to them, anyway, not to the rest of us.
Someday, in some form, those soaring debts will have to be repaid. By our children and their children and maybe their children.
In other words, the Bush administration has arranged for their dear friends, the richest people in America, to borrow (without permission, and with no intention of repaying – which is called stealing) $223,000 apiece from our grandchildren.
George Bush said his tax cuts were intended to stimulate the economy, so that everybody would be better off. Well, everybody HE knows will be better off – except that some of them will go to jail, because stealing is addictive.
Remember the theme song from the old Robin Hood TV series?
Robbin’ Bush, Robbin’ Bush,
Riding through the glen.
Robbin’ Bush, Robbin’ Bush,
With his band of men.
Rob from the poor!
Give to the rich!
Robbin’ Bush, Robbin’ Bush
That son of a bitch
Sing to the tune of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze,” and then feel free to add a few lines of your own!
This chirpy little Republican marching song answers to the tune of “Love and Marriage.”
Blame the victim,
Shame the victim,
and, if possible, you
Maim the victimOnce you’ve got their savings,
No-one will listen to their ravings
How it works: First, you select your victims – let’s say old people, who often get sick. Start by bleeding them dry with regressive taxes, and hand out their money to your robber baron chums.
This leaves the government without enough money to finance Medicaid. Whose fault is that? Theirs, obviously. Old people are a burden. So in 2005 the Republican Congress piously perpetrated the “Deficit Reduction Act,” which pushed more of the cost of Medicaid onto the consumer.
That made it virtually mandatory that the states vigorously promote (if not require) the purchase of long-term care insurance by the elderly.
The insurance companies are jubilant. The victims have yet another set of bills to pay.
But what about that “Deficit Reduction Act”? Why was that necessary after Clinton had handed Bush a big budget surplus? Oh, that. Just blame another set of victims – those expensive reservists (or at least the ones who are still alive) burning up billions a month on their second, third, and fourth tours of duty in Iraq. Later, Congress will cut their veterans’ benefits and health care, saving tons of money, as they did at the Roach Motel, AKA Walter Reed Hospital.
Then there are the burdensome victims of Katrina, many of them living ever since that tragedy in 120,000 FEMA trailers.
A year ago, FEMA was notified by field workers that these victims were being poisoned by formaldehyde fumes oozing from the trailers. So what did FEMA do? Nothing. If they were to conduct tests, it would start the clock on legal responsibility for the deaths and illnesses they were causing – a clear violation of Blame-the-Victim guidelines.
Besides, if you wait long enough, the victims are either dead or too sick to sue. Never give a sucker an even break.
That’s a Three-Fer!
Start with victims of a racist, elitist economic system who can’t afford to live above the flood plain. Victimize them again with defective levees that destroy their homes. Then nail them for a three-bagger with toxic trailers that exude carcinogens.
Historically, it took some negligence and corruption by Democrats and Dixiecrats (Republicans) as well as out-of-the-closet Republicans to set the stage for this biblical ordeal.
But it took the morally bankrupt, power-drunk, crony-ridden Bush League (They go together like a horse and carriage) to turn it into a Blame-the-Victim Trifecta.
As a source of smoke, fumes, and carbon dioxide, the tiny engine on a lawnmower or weed-whacker is trivial. But there are so many of them, and they are so loosely regulated for emissions or efficiency, that they add up to significant pollution.
California has started to regulate small engines, and now the EPA is beginning to move in the same direction.
What has not yet been addressed is the fact that the same principle applies to brains. Small brains are much less efficient than larger ones, and their emissions range from annoying to downright toxic.
They inflict far more damage on the environment and on society than large, powerful brains doing thousands of times more useful work.
The evidence for these conclusions consists of six and a half years during which the Bush administration and the religious right have teamed up to install a horde of puny intellects in positions once occupied by people with perfectly normal brains. The result is the worst fouling on record of the American political and cultural atmosphere.
A spokesperson for Focus on the Family is rumored to operate a brain of only four neurons that requires six pulls on the starting rope to generate even a silly mistake. Yet somehow this cortical pipsqueak manages to spew out even more noxious fumes than the whole Arkansas legislature, though somewhat less than those of Texas, Kansas, or Kentucky.
Our only hope is that such underdeveloped mechanisms, like those on lawnmowers, will someday be guided around the landscaping by illegal aliens.
What Mendeleyev did for the elements we’ve now done for the toxic miscreants.
Here at last is a link to the Periodic Table of the Criminal Elements.
You’ll meet O’Reilly (Blovium), Cheney (Sneerium), Bush (Moron), Gonzales (Perjuron), Yoo (Humbuggium), Zell Miller (Obnoxygen), Feith, Scalia, Abramoff—the whole rogues gallery.
Disclosure: the unspeakable remains nameless. Karl Rove, who lies [sic] beyond all known scientific limits of coloration, odor, viscosity, and toxicity, has been left to wallow in his own elemental name, Rovium.
