No, I’m not kidding. These guys are so idiotic that they requested earmarks that they rail against yet now say they will vote against them? The only people more idiotic are those who sent more Republican Teabaggers to Washington. What, you think the new ones will be any less elitist than to tell Republican Teabagger voters one thing and then do the opposite once elected? Classic.
President Obama finally took a tough stand on something that Republican Teabaggers expected him to yield on, and on which he initially did yield. Reversing an earlier decision, the Obama administration has taken steps to stop offshore fossil fuel drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico as well as off the east coast of the U.S. Those areas were opened by the administration in an effort to gain a Teabagger vote or two on the Senate climate and energy bill. When the Teabaggers Obama was seeking decided to take their ball and go home instead of bring the bill to the Senate floor, endangering this country and indeed everyone on Earth, climate activists were rightfully angry with the President’s pre-negotiation capitulation on the drilling issue.
In a to-date rare move, the Obama administration has taken back the prize that was freely given to Teabaggers and their dirty energy corporate masters. Deep-sea oil and gas drilling remains dangerous to the environment and to our national security. Only the development of renewable resource infrastructure will stop the spigot of American energy tax dollars going to petrodictators, most of whom use the money to fund anti-American activities. The Republican Teabaggers might enjoy supporting these tyrannical regimes, but most Americans do not. This is but one tiny step in stopping that morally outrageous practice.
Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.
You see, Republican Teabaggers think poor people want to be poor, so they have no one to blame but themselves for not being able to afford transplant operations that will keep them alive.
But the story has an added bonus: Jan Brewer is now blaming Obama and his health care reform insurance giveaway for killing these people.
The Republican governor has in turn blamed “Obamacare,” meaning the federal health care overhaul, for the transplant cuts even though the Arizona vote came in March, before President Obama signed that bill into law.
To uninformed Americans, this might resonate, since Republican Teabaggers have dishonestly attacked the legislation for 2 years now. What Brewer and other Teabaggers will never discuss is how forcing Americans to buy private insurance translates into an Arizona state health program deciding to save $14 million per year while poor people die for lack of transplant organs. Of course it doesn’t make sense. Nothing the Teabaggers propose as policy actually makes sense. This is simply what follows after millions of greedy, selfish old white people decide to exert their influence on politics. Wake up America: these kinds of policies are coming to a neighborhood near you if you allow the Teabaggers to take this country back to the 1750s.
I could advocate that the President finally wake up too, if I thought it would make any difference. Brewer’s cowardly assignment of blame is what results when you capitulate to everything extremists like her want. By all means, keep capitulating though. As long as Sarah Palin is the 2012 Republican Teabagger nominee, the President might be able to eek out a 2nd term.
A common theme in Republican Teabagger talking-points is that the coastal elites can’t manage budgets, but those in the heartland can and always do. This won’t cause any Teabaggers any lost sleep, but for those of us in the real world:
Ultra-Conservative Texas has a bigger budget gap than California. How big is their budget gap? A ridiculous 25% of current spending: $25 Billion! How did “fiscal conservatives” mismanage their budget so badly? Maybe it’s Texas Governor Ricky Perry’s absurd obsession with secession from the U.S. Maybe it’s tax cut after tax cut after tax cut that the Texas Cons passed in recent years. Naaaah, that can’t be it. According to Republican Teabagger Economic Orthodoxy, tax cuts always result it balanced budgets, more jobs and economic prosperity for everybody. Texas can’t look to the federal government for relief like they did in past years because Teabagger Orthodoxy has taken hold of national economics since then.
In short, Texas is about to feel the full impacts of just how extreme that Orthodoxy has been. Unfortunately, a lot of Texans who don’t adhere to that orthodoxy are going to be affected by it.
With newly-elected Republican Teabagger Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio, the Midwest might have voted itself decades’ worth of future economic heartache. The new governors want to make good on their campaign promises to stop high-speed rail projects.
A Milwaukee-Madison link was to be completely paid for, but Gov.-elect Scott Walker, in typical Republican fashion, wants the money wasted on roads instead. The grant money can’t be spent on roads, however. The intent of high-speed rail stimulus was to build … high-speed rail. I know, it’s a big shock.
Connecting Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati? It’s one of the “dumbest ideas” Gov.-elect John Kasich has ever heard of. Apparently, keeping Ohioans firmly in the 1950s as the rest of the world runs in the 2010′s isn’t one of those “dumbest ideas”.
I understand that upper-Midwesterners have had a rough go of it for decades now. Corporations have chosen $1/week jobs in undeveloped nations instead of paying Americans living wages for a couple of generations. The solution, however, wasn’t electing more of the ideological zealots that got them into today’s terrible economic mess in the first place. Identifying and strongly supporting liberal Democrats should have been part of the answer. Punishing pro-corporate Dems instead of pro-people Dems was, is and will remain the wrong thing to do.
I share the dissatisfaction with under-performing and anti-American CorporateDems. In 2012, Democrats across the country need to make a very strong push for liberals and progressives who want to put the American people first. Republican Teabaggers have a lot of cute sound-bites. But make no mistake about it, they want power only to further expand the difference between the richest 1% of Americans and the rest of us. Ohio and Wisconsin have set themselves back even further from actual economic recovery. Instead of helping themselves out a few years from now, any relief won’t be felt for more than half a decade from now, at the earliest. It’s not up to your politicians, Dems. It’s up to you. You need to take the lead in setting and keeping this country on the right track.
[Update]: I forgot about the $3 Billion (!) for the Hudson River Project that Gov. Chris Christie threw into the gutter. Oh, and Gov.-elect Rick Scott of Florida doesn’t want $2.5 Billion the feds have authorized for high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. Tell you what, the rest of us will gladly take these funds and put them to good use in our states. Numerous rail projects are possible in Colorado. Any funds from the federal government would help get those projects underway. Our economies would benefit as a result while your economies wouldn’t. If that’s what you want to do in order to maintain some ridiculous notion of proper economic policy, by all means, keep rejecting funds.
Meteor Blades, among others, picked up on the very same notion I did.
I was disheartened by Election 2010′s results for this reason among others: a good number of candidates who won their races are Republican Teabagger global warming deniers. As the anti-science movement gains more control of what’s left of the Republican Party, extremists of all stripes are gaining prominence. Unfortunately for the planet and our civilization, the anti-science extremists are going to ensure that global warming takes even stronger hold.
President Obama can make all the nice talk he wants about working together and everybody getting along. When I read that four Republican Teabaggers are trying to chair the House Energy Committee in order to reopen the floodgates for a deregulated fossil fuel industry, launch investigations against climate scientists and kill all clean-energy efforts, I take the Teabaggers at their word. If President Obama truly understands the magnitude and immediacy of the global warming crisis barreling towards us, he will also take them at their word.
So it was with some small measure of joy that I read this morning that climate scientists in the U.S. may no longer largely sit on their hands and wait for the truth to sink in to minds too small to comprehend that truth.
On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.
I know I will repeat this many times over the next two-plus years, but I’ll start saying it now to establish the record: you will hear lots of nonsense about the feverish imagined results of an illegal computer hacking last year, that climate scientists’ emails somehow proved the science didn’t show what it was showing. It’s all b.s. “Five independent panels subsequently cleared the researchers involved and validated the science.” That’s the truth.
I’ve written about the Heartland Institute before and gotten some flack from global warming deniers. Let’s see what Heartland has to say about a leading right-wing conspiracy-du-jour:
“People who ask for and accept taxpayer dollars shouldn’t get bent out of shape when asked to account for the money,” said James M. Taylor, a senior fellow and a specialist in global warming at the conservative Heartland Institute in Chicago. “The budget is spiraling out of control while government is handing out billions of dollars in grants to climate scientists, many of whom are unabashed activists.”
Their work is among the most stringently accounted for. Heartland and other deniers want the public to believe that scientists and the government are running amok, doing gosh-knows-what. If you think about that for just a few seconds, you can discern the seditious intent underpinning such an argument. Furthermore, if Heartland was truly concerned about the budget, they would be fully energized to stopping the occupation of two foreign countries, which has cost in excess of $1 Trillion already and continues to climb, as well as the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which were never paid for and are also costing the budget $1 Trillion. Since they’re doing neither, we know that their concern for this argument is trollish at best. Finally, who cares if climate scientists are activists, unabashed or otherwise. Is James or Heartland seriously arguing that people can’t exercise their freedom of speech rights? There are more amendments to the Constitution than just the 2nd, after all. The truth is this: today’s Cons only believe in free speech if they’re the ones speaking.
Well, we know most of this year’s election results. Some of those results are good and some aren’t so good. Here are some initial thoughts I have this morning.
Governor
John Hickenlooper is our next Governor, despite running a fairly lackluster campaign and never really developing an image. My hope is Hick doesn’t take his base for granted in the same way that, unfortunately, Gov. Ritter did. But just as was the case for President Obama, one of the most overlooked aspects of executives is who they put into power around them. I don’t think enough of Obama’s economic advisers have average Americans’ best interests in mind. I don’t have any idea of who Hickenlooper will put into place around him, but those personnel choices will be critical in the kind of governing he will do. I’ll talk more about him as I bring up other races below.
Blue Dogs
Rep. John Salazar was beat by his last opponent, Scott Tipton. Salazar was an alright Dem based on his overall voting pattern, but he did vote against key legislative items (global warming bill being the largest in my mind). More importantly, he chose to publicly rebuke his party. Overall, I’m not going to miss him very much.
Rep. Betsy Markey lost by a wide margin last night. This is a Dem Rep. I will miss, association with the Blue Dog caucus notwithstanding. Contrary to Salazar, she actually voted to do something about global warming and more importantly, she decided to show some real courage by defending her vote. She took the time to explain to her CO-04 constituents why that vote, and others she took, were important to them. The right-wing Denver Post editorial board took her to task for being “too liberal for her district”. I won’t hold my breath waiting for them to take Cory Gardner to task for being “too conservative for his district”. This seat was high on the Republican Teabagger hit list and could be characterized as a lost cause in a right-wing wave election. Hopefully a Democratic wave election hits again soon.
CO-07
Rep. Perlmutter won re-election, which I find interesting. The 7th is a district that is up for grabs and the fact that he held his seat in a wave election speaks volumes about his campaign effort.
TABOR Measures
Thankfully, 60, 61, and 101 lost big time – between 2:1 and 3:1. In context of the other races, this means a lot of Unaffiliateds and Republicans voted against the measures along with Democrats. These measures would have destroyed Colorado’s economy. We at least have a chance to still save most of it, if we’re willing to have honest discussions about the importance of investing in ourselves and our state. Continue Reading →
A lot has been made of the “enthusiasm gap” that might or might not exist between Republican Teabaggers eager to take our country back to the 1750′s and the Democrats who would prefer to keep moving forward into the 2000′s. To some extent, I think the enthusiasm gap does exist. I have provided brief examples in the past few weeks that could help in deciding whether the gap exists and whether it should exist.
Mortgage companies enrolled in the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure-prevention initiative may be receiving taxpayer funds despite not having a legal right to the home or to the mortgage, a top Treasury Department official revealed Wednesday.
But despite faulty or missing paperwork, the Obama administration allows mortgage companies to boot homeowners from the program, sticking the borrowers with massive bills that often leave them worse off.
Call me a wild-eyed liberal, but when a Democratic President who campaigned on fixing the economic disaster we were hurtling towards does more to help out those who set us on the course for disaster instead of the rest of us who, for the most part, were simply trying to lead our lives, well, I think you might be able to guess what the result is. How enthusiastic should those homeowners be toward the President or his administration? Obama has been riding the campaign trail for fellow Democrats pretty hard since Labor Day, telling crowds that his administration stopped the U.S. from going into another Great Depression; telling crowds that his administration fights for the little person; telling crowds that the bankers should be held accountable for their actions.
Stump speeches are all well and good, President Obama. But when the banks who first offered loans to people who they didn’t check to ensure could afford them then bundled them up (without the requisite paperwork) and sold them to make a profit, then bought insurance policies on the loans, bundled those up and sold them to make more of a profit, then bet short on the packages because they knew they were worthless to make even more of a profit, then got taxpayer money to bail them out from the mess they created now get more taxpayer money to illegally kick people out of their homes, how much support can you really expect from those homeowners and taxpayers?
Especially when your administration hasn’t forced the banks to actually unravel those packages and see how worthless they really are? Those bad mortgage default swaps should be fully accounted for on the banks’ ledgers. Yet your administration has allowed the banks to play accounting games so the losses don’t show up. Are we really to believe that the only entities who didn’t suffer as a result of the mortgage crisis were the banks? They didn’t turn unprofitable in the past 3 years; they’ve continued to set record profits. How glad are American voters supposed to be about that? By the way, those bad packages will have to come due sometime. And if your administration continues to kick that can down the road, like you have to so many other cans in the past two years, the result when they do come due will be many times more painful and devastating to the American economy than if they had been handled in the past 2 years.
But by all means, keep campaigning and telling Americans that everything will be alright with you and your buddies in charge. You didn’t create this mess, but by not taking responsibility for it during your term (much like Afghanistan), the mess will become defined as yours in the annals of history. Perhaps taking care of the multiple crises you face can take a higher priority in the next two years than you chasing down non-existent Republican Teabaggers who will compromise with you. They’ve told you there will be absolutely no compromise. Believe them at their word and start moving this country forward again, Mr. President.
