The Food Stamp program has always been a contentious, heavily partisan issue. A recent New York Times article highlights the back-and-forth that has characterized the highs and lows of the program, and where it seems to be headed. Today I've chosen to write about this controversial subject to, in part, document of my own direct personal experience. Though food stamp usage might have been more stigmatized in an earlier year, there is unfortunately still much bias and prejudice directed towards those who take advantage of its existence. Until this is eliminated, others will refuse to apply and find their poverty and need considerably worsened. If this be Welfare, it is one of the most essential safety nets ever devised and my fear is that a resurgent GOP presence will eliminate it altogether, or prune it back considerably.
Is President Obama sanctioning the assassinations of American citizens without due process just as George W, Bush did? It would appear that is exactly what he is doing.
President Obama has now extended Bush's "War on Terror" to Yemen. In today's Washington Post there is an article by Dana Priest where she writes:
U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
snip As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.
Pre- existing conditions? They are still in there, only now, instead of getting denied they get to jack the price up 3X and you'll be FORCED to buy something, and without competition who are you gonna choose? THEY WILL ALL CHARGE THE SAME CLIMBING PRICE!
Yearly caps? They are STILL IN THERE!
Death Panels? For Profit death panels, you betcha.
And loopholes, loopholes, loopholes!
I'm sorry, but Obama is NOT FDR. This is NOT the same political climate as when Social Security was passed or when Medicare was passed. Hell, this isn't even the same century!
So get over the fact that you have been TOTALLY SCREWED at this point and do something about it. This bill, as it stands, is so poisoned it should be killed and began again from the start, no matter how long and painful it might be. This CAN be dealt with in a year or two when the Conservative Wing of the Democratic part loses in droves, because that is coming one way or another.
I am PISSED, and you should be pissed too, cause we're getting SCREWED on this deal. The ONLY winners are the political class and the special interests. Consumers are getting sold down the river.
Wall Street must LOVE Socialism, because it is doing great under our new President, who has been declared a socialist by people who think capitalism is what happens when the bank overcharges you for no reason on overdraft fees.
So, if the wingnuts can say anything about this President and need no facts to prove so, barring any admission that Barack Obama IS a socialist, admits that he does think he is the Messiah after all or somebody finds Sean Hannity's crystal ball that gives him supernatural powers of clairvoyance, Ronald Reagan logically MUST be the devil.
Proof? You dare ask for Proof? Well who needs proof when you have a wild imagination and a blackboard to spell it out on, and thus I can prove that Barack Obama wants to kill all the smurfs, is, in fact a sekrit communist muslim, and Ronald Reagan is the devil.
Can you imagine this crook in the White House? No way this is in the cards for America's future! No way this white supremacist will be allowed in the White House!
Barbour Ignores Budget-balancing Stimulus in Fox News Criticisms By Bill Minor, 7-19-09
Jackson, Miss - Call it chutzpah, biting the hand that feeds you, or whatever else you might call it when the beneficiary of largesse disdains the one who made the goodies possible.
Gov. Haley Barbour goes on Fox News Channel's (where else?) Sean Hannity show four days after Mississippi's Legislature has handed him a balanced state budget without draconian agency cuts or big tax increases, thanks largely to money from President Obama's $785 billion stimulus package, officially known as American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Does Haley tell Sean anything about how the Obama stimulus money plugged gaping holes in the Mississippi budget? He does not.
No, he tears into the stimulus package with all the pat phrases from the Republican Party playbook.
"Too much spending on social policy and not enough on infrastructure," Barbour repeats, followed by the old GOP standby: "not enough tax cuts."
Adding, of course, "It would make a lot more sense if they'd given states more discretion over how to spend the money."
Translation: Give me say-so on where to put the money (we all remember how Barbour shifted $600 million in Katrina money intended to rebuild housing on the devastated Gulf Coast to the Port of Gulfport's 10-year old expansion plan that includes creating casino-hotel sites.)
What were the "social policy" programs Barbour told Fox viewers were wrongly included in Obama's recovery package?
Did that apply to the $160 million stimulus money that made it possible to fully fund Mississippi's K-12 education program, saving 4,500 teachers' jobs?
Or $133 million ARRA money for Title 1 to aid poverty students or another $122.3 million for school children with disabilities?
Or the $164 million ARRA money that saved the fiscally troubled Medicaid program and its 600,000 vulnerable clients?
Or the $177 million to the Department of Transportation for shovel-ready projects that will put hundreds of Mississippians to work?
At home, a different tune
Strangely, back home in Mississippi, Barbour whistled a different tune about the Obama recovery package in his Web site. It was saying "spending on all three levels of education will be the highest ever" and acknowledged that federal stimulus money made it possible.
On the Hannity show, Barbour sounded more like a hopeful to be on the GOP's 2012 ticket, veering off into water over his head on foreign policy and military preparedness.
He roundly criticized President Obama's recent meetings with Russia's two top leaders, and his agreement that both U.S. and Russia would reduce to 1,600 their nuclear warheads.
The Mississippi governor charged "it is no time to dismantle our nuclear arsenal to have a charm offensive with the Russians."
Barbour said that his hero, Ronald Reagan, would never have done such a thing, insisting that Ronnie "showed the world the Russians couldn't compete with us" in nuclear weaponry.
Barbour forgets Reagan
Obviously Barbour didn't know or conveniently forgot that Reagan, meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, stunned NATO allies and his aides by proposing both the U. S. and the Soviet Union scrap all of their nuclear weapons.
Reagan aides quickly went into damage control, attributing Reagan's off-handed nuclear giveaway to a brief lapse of memory, and told the Russian team just to forget what he said.
Makes Obama's nuclear agreement with the Russian leaders small potatoes by comparison.
Barbour's Fox News sortie into the foreign policy minefield brings to mind his unmemorable 1982 Senate race against aging Sen. John Stennis when he tried to portray Stennis, then one of the hawkish of war hawks in Congress, as soft on standing up to the Soviets in the Cold War.
Mississippians then saw that Barbour was talking pure hogwash and soundly defeated him.
Bill Minor is a syndicated columnist who has covered Mississippi politics since 1947.
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S.
...
in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.
In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.
The Single Payer Scourge. There is already a very large single payer health care system in this country. It's called Medicare. It has been around since 1965, beginning 44 years ago. According to the following Wikipedia article, which reads, in part, "Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government, providing health insurance coverage to people who are aged 65 and over, or who meet other special criteria. Medicare operates as a single-payer health care system ...(emphasis mine)" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Did you note that the first sentence described Medicare as a "social insurance program?" If the talking heads on the major television networks are to be believed, doesn't that sound like socialism, which is a first cousin, if not an identical, or at least a fraternal twin of communism?
James Thindwa, whose campaign for economic fairness for working people in Chicago has brought him up against the city's powerful political establishment and corporate giant Wal-Mart.
""Your average person is getting up every day to go to work, and to care for a family, doesn't have a lobbyist in Washington. They don't have a lobbyist in the city council. They don't have a lobbyist at the state legislature. The community organization gathers facts for them. They call meetings. They invite people to come. They invite elected officials to come, attend those meetings, so that they can listen to the community's grievance. It makes for participation."">>>>Read Transcript & Watch
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
-Imperial Grand Prophet Ronald Reagan (mystically foreseeing TARP)
With the passage of the massive economic stimulus plan set to be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday in Denver the dying squeals of Republican piggies grown fat on the failed policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan are becoming more shrill, psychotic and deafening. The stimulus plan, even as diluted as it is by the inclusion of all of those great tax cuts that have resulted only in proving that trickle down economics is nothing more than Gulliver pissing on the heads of the Lilliputians (translation: the working class) and doing so with sadistic mirth. What the stimulus package represents more than anything even including the ridiculous fucking tax cuts is that the end of an era is nigh and that the machinery of government is being slowly redirected to a previous form where it was not weaponized by overly wealthy pigs, Wall Street looter capitalists and avaricious corporations who only stand for, to borrow from the words of the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:
... the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it."
President-elect Barack Obama's adminstration will inherit a $1.2 trillion budget deficit for 2009 according to the forecast by the Congressional Budget Office.
Unfortunately for the United States, despite owning more than $1 trillion of American debt, China has hinted that enough is enough. Rather than continuing to spend "as much as one-seventh of its entire economic output buying foreign debt", Beijing now plans to pay for its own $600 billion economic stimulus plan.
China's timing is unfortunate for the American economy, since the federal budget deficit is likely to swell past $2 trillion in 2009 when Congress passes a further economic stimulus measure. The CBO forecast also does not include the ongoing spending for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where is Obama going to find the money to restart the U.S. economy?
"I intend to speak the truth to you tonight. It's not pleasant, and certainly for me...It's very painful. However, it is my hope, my prayer, that by being here tonight, I can open the door, provide you with a tiny glimpse of the tortured and of our moral and Christian responsibilities, to not only oppose, but to prevent torture."
Ronald Reagan came into office with three major ideas in mind. Vastly expand defense spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and do something about the annual budget deficit, then hovering around $80 billion a year. He did increase defense spending, something rightwingers still like to falsely claim sent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. And he did cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic increases in income while starting us down the road toward a Third World skewing of the ratio between rich and poor. He achieved this with the assistance of more borrowing than all the Presidents who had preceded him. Compared with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, however, Reagan was a piker.
The Great Communicator had image-conscious speechwriters. When Reagan first addressed Congress in February 1981, he said:
I've been trying ... to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is. The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.
Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, before a television audience, President Ronald Reagan initiated one of the grandest defense boondoggles of all time, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Like many boondoggles, it was couched in sweet talk and lies:
The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression -- to preserve freedom and peace. ...
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.
Those lines and the rest of the speech sure sounded good to many. As had been the case almost since the arrival of Werner von Braun and the other V-2 rocket engineers at the end of World War II, when it came to space, America talked peace and prepared for war. After sputnik went beeping around the planet every 96 minutes in 1957, the effort was greatly intensified, always with the threat of Soviet attack as the rationale. This was true whether it was JFK campaigning about a bogus "missile gap" or a 1980s Pentagon inflating Moscow's military power at the urging of the Committee on the Present Danger's nascent neo-conservatives. Reagan's speech was nothing new on that score.
In fact, U.S. talk about putting weapons onto the ultimate high ground of outer space started well before President Reagan gave his Star Wars speech. In 1947, German Major General Walter Dornberger, who had headed the Nazi rocket program, began officially advising the U.S. Air Force. Like any good Nazi, he recommended putting nuclear bombs into orbit to attack Soviet cities and military installations. He also proposed a space-based defense against missiles, an orbiting ring of hundreds of satellites, sentries armed with small rockets capable of destroying enemy ICBMs.
Today Bob Herbert takes his whack at the "Ronald Reagan didn't use racist tactics" piñata. He scores a direct hit:
To see Reagan's appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like "states' rights" in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.
Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.
The suggestion that the Gipper didn't know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.
So we all know that David Brooks is an idiot. We also know that he's a liar. But it's unusual to hear about it from "serious" figures in the SCLM. Paul Krugman is actually a serious person--in that his brain hasn't decomposed into lima bean paste. He's been in a back-and-forth with the the adjacent liar, Brooks, over the question of whether or not Ronald Reagan used racist campaign tactics. Krugman's smack down response? It was all just an innocent mistake:
"I intend to speak the truth to you tonight. It's not pleasant, and certainly for me...It's very painful. However, it is my hope, my prayer, that by being here tonight, I can open the door, provide you with a tiny glimpse of the tortured and of our moral and Christian responsibilities, to not only oppose, but to prevent torture."
March on Washington
Ronald Reagan came into office with three major ideas in mind. Vastly expand defense spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and do something about the annual budget deficit, then hovering around $80 billion a year. He did increase defense spending, something rightwingers still like to falsely claim sent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. And he did cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic increases in income while starting us down the road toward a Third World skewing of the ratio between rich and poor. He achieved this with the assistance of more borrowing than all the Presidents who had preceded him. Compared with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, however, Reagan was a piker.
