To hear the 1 percenters and those 99 percenters bent on voting against their own economic self-interests tell it, you could slap a bushy beard and crazy wig on Barack Obama and he’d be the new Karl Marx. That Karl Marx could take a Viennese sachertorte-sized chomp out of their ass and they wouldn’t know him is beside the point.
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” harkens back to the bad old days when careers and lives were ruined by Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy, an alcoholic, demagogic Senator from Wisconsin. His bullying excesses become known as McCarthyism and he and his supporters caused far worse damage to the nation than the most evil of Communists ever did.
BLACK = WELFARE - Everyone, and by everyone I mean the AFS's Bryan Fischer, knows that welfare creates poor people, makes African-Americans irresponsible, and destroys marriage. Oh, and it apparently doesn't do that to white people. They'll be relieved to hear that I'm sure.
The American Family Association’s resident knothead, Bryan Fischer, is no stranger to controversy. His claims are so odd and his beliefs so narrow, I can never quite decide if he’s a run of the mill crapweasel or an exceptionally smooth manipulator of his flock’s built-in fears and prejudices. Either way, he’s quite convincing. I guess I’ll stick with the former and not the latter. So it’s settled, he’s a run of the mill crapweasel.
Fischer posits in a recent blog post that, “poverty has won”. I’m actually with him on that one. Any random chart about the rapidly growing gap between the haves and have nots is clear on that point – even for a man with the perception of your average tree stump. However, its Fischer’s interpretation of those random charts that’s so troubling and his prescriptions so off the mark.
In Fischer’s eyes, poverty is a wacky sort of socialist plot, “We need more people in public office who think like Christ and fewer people who think like Karl Marx,” he advises. I’m with him there too and I’m an atheist!
However, if he’s not so hot on Karl, he’s even less so on African-Americans in a decidedly less than Christian way.
Suckling the Government Tit
Fischer says welfare has trashed the African-American family with incentives for literally screwing like rabbits to glom onto the juicy, government tit. “It’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits,” he said. According to him, the bunnies should be getting married instead.
RABBIT RUTTERS - Just another family of rabbit rutting African-Americans out to go on the dole.
Fischer knows whence he speaks about marriage. He knows that homosexuals can’t do it lest the Republic fall. He knows wives should always obey and submit to their husbands. He knows that BJs do not a good marriage make. And the married darkies? They’re just raising Easter bunnies in the hood to steal tax dollars.
But unlike his unparalleled knowledge of marriage, the Assistant Messiah™ doesn’t know sh*t from shinola about the rest of the world.
Bryan, just a few notes for your sleeve the next time you take the Holier Than Thou Grad School test. Don’t worry, a little cheating is OK as long as it’s for Jesus – it’s the 11th Commandment, “It be OK for the holy to use crib notes.”
Many of those rutters are married rabbits – the straight ones anyway. They went down to the local padre and tied the knot. And wouldn’t you know it, the next day their poverty parted like the befouled Red Sea. Go ahead, ask one. He’ll tell you all about it.
And it’s not just the blacks Bryan. All white people are pious and married and full of the bounty of Christ, if you can call their poverty a bounty. And the brown folk? Why all of them are in the running to helm ConAgra instead of just pick veggies for them. Damn, how that God stuff works! You think blacks are just like all the other poor people except even more so – an impediment to the spread of the gospel and tax cuts.
I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d wager he knows as much about poverty as he does about Jesus, which is to say not much. On the other hand, I know a little something about it.
My grandparents lived in abject poverty. Without exaggeration, their house looked like Snuffy Smith’s. The only advantage it had over a cardboard box was a deed somewhere. It left them free to use the back room for kindling, which is exactly what they did one particularly bad winter. Freezing isn’t much of an option when you can’t get out in hip-deep snow to chop wood. They probably used the deed to start the fire too. Yet my grandparents were married, one grueling day after another for nearly 50 years. And poverty was an unwelcome house guest for every damn one of them.
Controlling Asscakes Like You
Oh BTW, they were white. And they faithfully went to church. And they prayed many times a day, but God must’ve been busy trying to control asscakes like you.
They didn’t take a dime of the government’s money – partly because they were too uneducated to figure out how. Yet, they plugged along, rutted some, and ate the rabbit for dinner, because what they hunted wasn’t for sport. It was what saved them from starvation – no miraculous 3 loaves and fishes for them, just a gruelish stew of rabbit sans loaves (because they couldn’t afford flour) and fishes (because the streams were all toxic from unregulated coal mines).
Do some African-American families choose to let their families go all to hell? Yup, but so do whites and Latinos and even members of churches. However, many of them are married and the problem persists. Just as many aren’t married, but somehow manage to do right by their families despite bigger obstacles than the AFA braves over a 3-martini lunch with a grifter politician who prefers to buy votes than work for them. And they do it with a little help from Uncle Sam. That seems like a fair trade for companies working some poor bastard to death at 3 jobs because there isn’t anything else. Just a little unexpected, indirect corporate welfare.
Should people who have abandoned their families man-up and take responsibility? YES! Will poverty for most of them stop by following your golden rules, don’t bet on it.
See Bryan, poverty knows no color. It’s an equal opportunity scourge. Growling bellies know no race. Red or yellow, black or white, poverty is poverty. Perhaps you’d do well to remember the last line of the little ditty:
“Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF ME - A debate about taxes is a good thing. Today's debate about taxes...not so much.
Taxes are a lot like salaries. If you paid someone $1 million a day (oh wait, we do) they’d scream bloody murder they should’ve gotten $1,ooo,ooo.o1. If you taxed someone 1%, they’d whine they shouldn’t have to pay more than 000.1%, with those whining the loudest being the people with the lowest tax rates and highest pay.
Perhaps the most oft-repeated charge against Obama bin Karl Marx and the Democrat Politburo is that they’re dangerous socialists. But according to a recent story from CNBC, a funny thing happened on the way to the Kremlin. If you look at their list of the 10 most socialist states, there’s a whole lotta red in Governors’ mansions. In fact, six of 10 governors sport big red Rs next to their names. BTW, the People’s Republic of California didn’t even make the list.
All the tri-cornered hats and tea bags notwithstanding, the charge that most states are tax and spend Central Bureaus is shaky too.
Despite the screeching about high taxes, Americans enjoy some of the lowest taxes in the western world. American companies pay the second highest taxes, but they don’t mention their taxes are high because American companies gorge on taxpayer-funded corporate welfare far more damaging than the most greedy, imaginary, Cadillac-driving welfare queen.
American Productivity: The Bee’s Knees
They also don’t say they’re leaving the US not so much because of high taxes, but because they can hire workers from Third World countries at pennies on the dollar relative to Americans workers. Oh yeah, American workers who are generally rated as some of the most productive in the world.
The uber-capitalist view on this is that government is inherently inefficient and can’t be trusted with a dollar and there is massive fraud out there to be picked like leaves from the Liberty Tree. However, everyone’s favorite tax and spend worker’s paradise, California, has the lowest number of employees per 10,000 residents.
YEA! - That's what poorly funded schools do for you.
And when it comes to California’s current economic pickle, it’s useful to remember that if California were a country, its economy would be the eighth largest in the world – somewhere around the size of Spain’s. Fixing California’s problems is as difficult as fixing the two national economies that’ve already gone off the edge – Iceland and Ireland. BTW, both have smaller economies than California’s. But take heart don’t tax and spender conservatives, if Ireland goes, we could overtake Spain. USA! USA! USA!
Plus, a remnant from the last misguided tax revolt is a draconian tax and spend process worse than the broke Eurotrash’s. You may have heard of it, Prop 13. Prop 13 makes it extremely difficult to raise taxes to support social programs, infrastructure projects, and most importantly, education. So, California’s educational system has dropped from best in the nation to sub-Alabama levels since its introduction, its roads look like mule trails to the Hindu Kush, and social and educational programs have taken the biggest hits in the sausage slicing process…in a state with more poor people than any other.
Rid the government of fraud you say?
That’s a dandy idea, but none of our erstwhile CEO/politicians can explain how much there is, where it is, or how to cut it. BTW, if we removed of all of it, the spending effect – like banning earmarks – would be like pissing into a hurricane.
Of course we could start cutting the continued contracts with known fraudsters like, Blackwater/XE, Halliburton, and dozens of others carbuncles on the ass of the American economy. But hey, what do I know…except that having worked in both the public and private sectors I can vouch for the fact that fraud, abuse, and waste in corporate America is roughly the same in government America after being scaled to their relative sizes.
Moossilini and the Gajillionaire
Yes, people have a right to complain when their tax money isn’t spent wisely and no one wants to pay any more than necessary (excepting gajillionaire Warren Buffet, but you know how crazy the unbelievably rich are). But there’s the rub. One man’s waste is another man’s essential. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have a problem – even if Moosilini says it is. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Yet, you can bet that when it comes to the cutting, some of the same folks who now complain righteously, albeit incorrectly, aren’t going to be happy.
Do you think that Granny holding the “Get Rid of Obamunist” sign is going to be happy when the people she voted for decide that her Social Security and Medicare are wasteful perks? How about those who are ready to send Junior off to college only to find that all that grant money went poof? And when Mom gets e-coli from some ConAgra-raised hamburger, treated with bum drugs, and it eventually kills her (without even the courtesy of a death panel) the FDA doesn’t look so wasteful anymore.
We are all Americans and part of the responsibility of every American is to chip something in for the common good of the nation – or we would be called the United States of Me.
Stop yelling about how bad you’ve got it.
You could be working 14 hours a day in an Indonesian sweatshop to make shirts you’ll buy on the cheap at Walmart.
Always low taxes…Always.
IT'S A DIRTY JOB, BUT WHY'S HE DO IT? - There are no 'mixed signals'. Much of the damage done to Obama was caused by Obama.
There are many things Barack Obama has reneged on during his first two years and as a result the country has never benefited from his promises of change. Instead, he’s become more Bush Lite in many ways.
The War of Error goes on – apparently indefintely. Gitmo is still open and many of the accused are still waiting for counsel, much less actually getting a trial. He’s cast aside promises on gay marriage, DADT, transparency, and limitations on presidential powers hoping some lucky Washington voodoo will somehow resolve the issues for him. On every major issue, he begins compromising before negotiations even begin. But perhaps his biggest blunders are in the way Americans live and work , or often, don’t work.
Obama faces a host of accusations that he’s a raving socialist busily fist-bumping the ghost of Karl Marx. The problem is, the facts don’t fit the accusations and they don’t fit because Obama has perfected that Bushian ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Profits Up, Obama Down
Despite the cat calls, profits at American corporations have steadily risen since that awful commie took office. In fact, they set a record in the Q3. Profits are up, not because Obama opposes business, but because he colludes with them. The CEO compensation juggernaut is traveling like such a runaway locomotive that even the richest of the rich are calling for higher taxes on themselves – yet, Obama is open to the idea of extending Bush tax cuts for the rich before the debate gets underway.
No wonder the head Mertle of the Grand Old Turtles, Mitch McConnell, feels justified in treating Obama persona non grata. He knows The Messiah™ will crack at even token opposition. Obama’s once sterling approval overseas is eroding quickly too, making it hard for him to effect meaningful change on the global stage.
Perhaps the best example of his special talent in taking too long to do too little to benefit the wrong people is his woeful stewardship of flagship issue, health care.
Before the debates even began, Republicans, who trumpeted their alleged bipartisan civility, said the bill was DOA. As Democratic lawmakers ineptly tried to hammer out compromise after compromise, they went all dirty sanchez on every Republican with a case of political hemorrhoids while caving to hundreds of demands and letting Republicans call them uncooperative, hyperpartisan Visigoths favoring the offing of your 90-year old grammy because she has a hangnail.
Grammy’s Hangnail
Hidden among those compromises were plenty for health insurers who are some of the most despicable miscreants in American economics. These are people who literally put grammy’s well being far behind their own. They have a proven track record of rationing health care and reaping the rewards in excessive compensation.
Despite a bill that was popular at the time and is now favored by voters 49-40%, Americans got a huge bill from the insurance companies before almost anything actually took effect. They got that because Obama caved to their demands just as he caved to the neo-tea baggers. In return, he was charged with shameless socialism…by the same Republicans and lobbyists who brokered – if one could call it that – the sweetheart deal. Repblibaggers say they’ll repeal it bit won’t – unless by repeal you mean rejigger it so the deals get better for the unhealth care giants and their minions in striped suits and whigtips.
BO may know sports, but politics? Not so much. He has established a firm and repeatable record for setting himself up for the Big Fail. He gives a carrot to the Grand Old Elephants, who throw it a few feet down the road. Trying to be a nice, agreeable guy he bends down to pick up the carrot. Suddenly, the elephant breaks out a huge stick and beats him like a rug. Then, after the beat down, he dutifully hands the carrot back to the elephant who accuses him of being an oafish prick for dropping it, throws it down the road, and starts the cycle again.
For such a smart guy, you’d think he’d learn this is a really mean game of carrot and stick.
