Republicans Support Social Welfare

Republicans politician and pundits coming to the defense of social welfare organizations is the story coming out of the latest IRS scandal.  They are admitting there is a need for social welfare, which before this scandal, they seemed to want to do away with it entirely. 

The free market can take care of society, and doesn’t need and shouldn’t get any help from any government, local or federal, has been their rant since the days of FDR and LBJ.  The term “social welfare” was said in the same tone as communism and socialism.  It was un-American.  It was a drag on the economy and retarding our recovery from the current recession.  And yet, here they are burning our precious resources in bandwidth and airtime attacking those of the IRS that would question a social welfare’s operation.

Liberals should be celebrating that conservatives have boarded the social welfare boat.  Liberals can now say:  come, let’s sit down together and reason how social welfare should be done.

Even if the support for social welfare is a ruse by conservative political actions groups in which the important issue is not tax exemption but the reporting exemptions for financial sources, liberals should embrace the lie and make conservative live the lie.  Liberals are using the same tax exemption for the same reason, but social welfare is something they have supported as long as conservatives have been trying to undo it.

Liberals are suppose to be the smart ones, but the conservatives are eating their lunch.  Conservatives may have been slow to recognize the impact of television but they have become past masters of the medium.  Fox News’ ratings prove just how proficient at spin they’ve become since Nixon blew his first debate with Kennedy on looks and not substance.  

Republicans are going on record wherever anyone will point a camera at them defending the right of the Tea Party’s tax exemption.  Let me state that again:  Republicans are defending federal funding for social welfare.

If that is not a victory for liberals, I don’t know what is, and yet all liberals do is complain that the Tea Party is a political organization using a loophole in the tax laws by posing as a social welfare organization. 

Liberals, you’ve been handed the spin football.  Run with it.

Slavery and Gun Control

Is America’s philosophy toward gun control like its treatment of slavery?  When slavery in North America finally ended with the Civil War and  13^th Admendment, the moral trend against slavery had succeeded long before in civilized nations.  By the 1800s, slavery only existed in primitive, untamed, unexplored parts of the world, and the United States.  As a country proudly claiming our freedom, we could not end what all the other educated, enlighten, and at that time, modern kingdoms had done.  Is gun control following that same trajectory?

I’m all for effective gun control, but I have not heard of any that would meet the criteria of effective.  As long as the crazies can get guns easier than they can get help, we are going to have a problem.  Those that prohibit any form of gun control are the same ones cutting funding for mental health.  We have met the enemy and he is us.

We at this blog stand foursquare with the Constitution, and if we lived at the time of its writing, would have taken to the streets to insure the 2^nd Amendment was included.  Then, a gun was needed way more for survival than preventing a crime or enforcement of some cause.   Now, the need for a gun is more social and questionable. 

Googling the concept of a gun stopping or preventing a crime will give all kinds of results both in its support and proof it’s a myth.  Generally, the success stories are of gun toting crime preventers with previous experience or training in just such a confrontation.  These crime preventers usually have more experience in guns use than the crime perpetrators.   An off duty cop or service man that just got back from a combat zone is the “good guy with a gun” that prevented a crime.

And these guys will be the first to tell you, no matter how you may think you will preform in a similar situation, you don’t know until it happen to you, and then it’s too late.  Hours and hours of training helps, but it is not hard to Google up stories of cops firing hundreds of shots with few hits of their target – if at all, and they are the pros.  

While some believe the best form of gun control is to carry one, others know that carrying a gun and using it during a highly emotional crisis is two different things.  Arming teachers will do no good without extensive training and possible exposer to a life and death situations.  Do we really want our education majors including that in their course of study?  

But that gets us back to the original argument for “effective” gun control.  The recent gun control legislation that failed to pass would have been less restrictive than what is in Connecticut, and it didn’t work there.  The shooter was legal until he walked into that school.  Obama’s gun control would be no more effective than the current laws in Connecticut were.

The more liberal states are trying for some sort of gun control and enlighten foreign countries are doing the same.  Just like the legacy of slavery, only lawless backward countries have no gun controls – and the United States.  It's déjà vu all over again.

Congress has left the Building

Congress did it again.  This “do-nothing” Congress passed legislation to stop the delays at airports brought on by recent sequestration.  They fixed their draconian law to fix the budget if they couldn’t fix it by their time-honored method of compromise. 

The punch line in this joke is that they undid what affected them personally in this whole sequestration insult to American knowhow.   The recently passed bill in a body that is legislationally disadvantaged shows exactly how this congress works.

If the sequestration affected their medical health insurance, they would have fixed that and maybe even Obamacare.

If family members were jobless and losing benefits in keeping their homes, they would fix the sequestration cuts to the unemployed.  

If their children or grandchildren depended on Meals on Wheels as much as they do air travel, they would have fixed the cuts to that.

Even if flight delays was purposely done by the Obama administration to dramatize the sequestration, the fact that Congress passed a bill to counteract it proves this Congress can act.  It shows they can only act when their best interest are at stake.

If they did not have a place to sleep, they would fix the plight of the homeless.

If family members and even friends where being endangered by crazies with guns, they would pass meaningful gun legislation.  As long as the mentally ill can get guns easier than they can get help, we got a problem.

I have posted previously that this government of a split Congress with a Democrat in the White House can do nothing, but I was proved wrong.  They can act when it discomforts them personally.

The Message is in the Medium

Recent news stories in the Washington Post and BuzzFeed pointed to something tucked away in the GOP’s report on Growth & Opportunity Project.  (Would that be GOP’s GOP or GOP’s G&OP?)  The GOP is going to hire “activists” to YouTube Democrats in what will be seen as embarrassing shots for the party.  (Has YouTube become like Google and can be used as a verb?)

Here from the report, page 54, section 11, “Define the D’s early AnD TrAck ‘EM”, (Why all caps?) and the chapter “Introduction to Friends and Allies” is the juicy quote:

Begin quote

Well-funded conservative groups should seek to hire activists to track Democrat incumbents and candidates with video cameras constantly recording their every movement, utterance, and action. Within the applicable legal constraints, we need to create our own video content, bank it, and release it when it suits our candidates’ needs. 

An allied group dedicated solely to research to establish a private archive and public website that does nothing but post inappropriate Democrat utterances and act as a clearinghouse for information on Democrats would serve as an effective vehicle for affecting the public issue debate.

End quote

The stories listed above claim the new GOP vehicle for doing this is America Rising, and it is a copy of the Democrats’ America Bridge, which “allegedly” outed Todd Akins’ infamous statement that legitimate rape did not cause pregnancy because the woman’s vagina somehow interrogated incoming sperm as to how they got there and would not let rape sperm pass – a TSA in women’s privates.  I wonder if they have intimate reveling scanners or full ejaculate searches.

Doesn’t both American Bridge and America Rising sound a lot like the White House Plumbers – before they got into bugging?

The head of America Bridge, Rodell Mollineau, welcomes the competition but believes there will be slim pickings for them since Democrats do not live the double standard lives of Republicans.  Mollineau claims Republican talk extreme right philosophy when talking privately to the Tea Party and then middle of the road, moderate politician when talking to the general public or when cameras are rolling.  Examples other than Akins’ are Richard Mourdock’s comment on God’s blessing rape or Romney’s 47 percent of Americans are free-loaders.  Mollineau claims Democrats don’t do that.  There are no hidden liberals making empty liberal promises, so he claims. 

Bleeding-heat liberals are no different than the Tea Baggers, and America Rising is going to prove him wrong.  Or will it prove something entirely else?

What I’m waiting to see from the new GOP plumbers group is what they tape and “expose”.   What they think is embarrassing or potentially political suicide may be more illuminating of the Republicans than footage of a Democrat acting a fool.  The more interesting story may be what they choose to expose, and in so doing, expose their own selves. 

A young Republican journalist-in-name-only has pioneered “the rising”.  James O’Keefe got a lot of air time on Fox News until he got busted for bugging a New Orleans democrat’s phone.  While masquerading as a pimp to get a misleading story is journalistically unethical, impersonating any technician and bugging phones is illegal as well as bad journalism.  No doubt, Fox New would have run it had O’Keefe not got caught.

Here it is once again:  White House Plumbers.  History repeats, and this is especially true for conservatives' behavior since they are the buttresses of tradition.  How America Rising chooses to expose its targets may be the bigger story.

Send in the Drones

Over at HuffingtonPost, today, they had a story about the tragic death of innocent people, especially children, from our drone attack.  It pissed me off to no end.  I left a comment but I got no replies, responses, likes or faves.  So, here goes…

3,000+ Americans have been targeted, all of them as -- if not more -- innocent as any bystander in Afghanistan or Pakistan.  And here is the key, essential, way more important point: innocent Americans were all targeted ON PURPOSE!!!  The intent was to attack and kill as many innocent Americans as possible.

OK, the 125 at the Pentagon may have been quasi-military targets, but they were more bureaucrats than solders, and although there’s many a Tea Bagger that would say they were doing us a service taking out federal bureaucrats, still there was noting “collateral” about it.  The innocent bystanders were the targets.

That is the enemy. 

I left a question.  3,000+ not enough?  How many more Americans have to be targeted or killed before you will say send in the drones?  Give us a number.  Or, do we have to pass the number before you say enough is enough?

As the atomic bomb is to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, so to killer drones are to 9/11.  It’s the new war.   Don’t North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the ones around him realize that if they start something, they will be targeted?  If they start something, they will not live long enough to know how it will end.

I realize that life in American may change when the drones come home to roost.  They’ll be looking over my shoulder or that of the police.  Who knows how they will be used, but used they will be.  It’s the new “new.”

But back to our current unpleasantness.

What if they take some innocent kid and promise him 40 virgins in heaven if he will strap Iranian highly enriched nuclear material to his body and detonate it in an American city and kill millions of innocents – ON PURPOSE – would you send in the drones then?

Cliff Notes on the Recent Unpleasantness

What’s wrong with American, today?  Is the latest slapstick in Washington proof that America is ultimately a failed system?  Will we eventually plunge over the way hyped cliff of some sort?  Lots of questions like this floating around about what is wrong with that American dream of we are the best and brightest, the finest, and the future of the world.  And yet, we seem to be stuck, unable to progress, unable to get done what needs to be done, unable to move on. 

It’s not Obama. It’s not liberals, nor is it right wing extremist.  It’s not the end of the America that everyone in the world has dreamed, feared, or fanaticized.  It is the current structure of our government.   Not the structure a president and two houses of Congress, but the structure of which party controls what.  Our current structure is not unprecedented but it doesn’t happen often, and when it does, things tend to go undone.

The cold hard truth is:  a Republican Congress does not work well with a Democratic President.  If a Democrat is in the White House, and Republicans control either house of Congress, nothing gets done.  Government comes to a standstill.  Democrats in control of either house of Congress will work with a Republican president, but alas, the reverse is not true.  Republicans will just not work with a Democratic president.  A split Congress in which one party controls one house and the other has the majority in the other is even worse than one party controlling both houses of Congress and the other in the While House.

The rise of the Tea Party Republicans has made this situation even worse.  While Republicans march lock-step – moderates are afraid to moderate for fear of loosing their party’s nomination in the next election – unity among Democrats is like herding cats.  There is no control of Democrats like we are seeing of Republicans.  Democrats will cross over and support Republican legislation they deem importation to the nation, if not their constituents, while Republican never will.  So, the defining moment is which party is in the White House and which party controls Congress at the same time. 

But these are new times and Congressional Republicans fear the Tea Party or Grover Norquist or Fox News.  One thing can be said for all Republican congressional members, they speak with one voice.  It’s just whose voice is it that is the question - certainly not their constituents.  Democrats are not like that, and recent history has shown, they will support a Republican president.

Poor Obama:  the first black president, overwhelmingly reelected, and stuck with Republican control of at least one house of Congress in which the Tea Party has undue influence.  Maybe claim to a precedent is more important than any legacy. 

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, six years of Republican control in both houses of the 104^th to 106^th Congress, statistics show that legislation was passed consistent with scenarios in which the same party was in both the White House and Congress or a Republican White House with a Democratic control of one house of Congress.  However, this says more about Bill Clinton than government structure.

Sadly, as we all witnessed over the last few years, Obama may be the better family man but he is not the better politician.

The statistics for the 96^th through 112^th Congress (1979-2012):

Party in While House/Party in Congress	Number of Occurrences	Average Number Laws Passed
Dem/Dem	3	531
(Obama) Dem/Split	1	239
(Clinton) Dem/Rep	3	449
Rep/Rep	2	506
Rep/Split	4	569
Rep/Dem	4	626

Since FDR, the only other Democrat in the While House other than Clinton to face a Republican Congress was Truman and the 80^th Congress.   The “do nothing” Congress that Truman ran against in 1948.  Eisenhower and Nixon governed with a Congress controlled by Democrats, but like I said, the statistics support the old saying that Democrats will work with a Republican President.

So you see it’s not that America has failed as a democracy to govern itself, but just a period of unpleasantness in which America has painted itself into its least favorite corner.  Everything will be OK once Democrats regain control of both houses of Congress or any Republican is elected President.

Some would argue in favor of the current stalemate under the delusional assumption that less government is better government.  While a government that has difficulty passing anything may create fewer laws, that does not prevent it from passing a bad law, and then it cannot pass the needed legislation to correct its mistakes.  The recent “fiscal cliff” deadline is a prime example. 

The source for the numbers above can be found at GovTrack.us and Party Control of Presidency and Congress.