Late last week I noticed a scary change in Obama's rhetoric in regard to healthcare reform.
For the past year, through the primaries, the general election and on up until now in the presidency, Obama was calling for comprehensive reform. During the primaries, I chose to go with Obama (when a lot of my colleagues were jumping on the Hillary Clinton bandwagon) because of his promise to fight for a single-payer healthcare plan.
Jump back to Friday last week, when Obama, at a presser in the White House, referred to healthcare reform as "health insurance reform.” This is a big development; this change of rhetoric indicates that Obama has altered his position on reform, moving closer to that of the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee has decided to forgo the public option and instead to make only small changes to insurance policy.
This change is unacceptable to me. When Americans voted for "change we can believe in" (and voted Democrats into Congress, the Senate and the presidency), we expected real change. Seventy-four percent of Americans are on board for healthcare reform. Real healthcare reform, not watered-down, hand-the-health-industry-more-money, fake-bipartisan "insurance reform.”
So I did what any concerned citizen should do: I sent a letter to my congresswoman. Because I live in San Francisco, my representative is Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D).
Rep. Nancy Pelosi
Please, Please, Please, don't let the Fiance Committee, who we all know has sold out to the insurance and drug companies, determine how we reform health insurance. I would like single payer to be on the table or at least we need a public option. We don't need insurance reform, we don't need another way to shovel money into the pockets of these thieves and scammers in insurance and drug industries.
My girlfriend's guardian had a stroke last year and his medical bills are now driving him to bankruptcy. This is the last thing he needs to deal with as he is trying to recover. I work freelance and have to pay for my own insurance and I am afraid to visit the doctor. Every time I visit my doctor makes me take tests that I cannot afford. I fear one day I will may be injured and financially ruined as well. I can barely afford the monthly payments.
When Republicans (rethuglicans) were in charge Democrats went along with almost all of Bush and Congress' legislation. I would be very pleased if you guys made a stand and gave us the legislation we demanded when we voted in a Democratic Congress last year. If you guys lay down and allow the Blue Dogs and Republicans to win the day be prepared to lose your jobs. [I know, a little dramatic.]
Thank you
-Tad
The reply I received:
Dear Tad:
Thank you for contacting me to express your views on H.R. 676, the United States National Healthcare Act of 2009. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.
H.R. 676, introduced by Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), would provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents and for improved healthcare delivery. On January 26, 2009, H.R. 676 was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the House Committee on Ways and Means, and the House Committee on Natural Resources. No further action has been taken. Please be assured I will keep your comments in mind should H.R. 676 come before the full House of Representatives
Thank you again for contacting me on this important issue. I hope you will continue to communicate with me on matters of concern to you. For more information on this and other issues affecting our city and our nation, please visit my website at www.house.gov/pelosi or sign up to receive e-mail updates at www.house.gov/pelosi/IMA/subscription.html.
Sincerely,
Nancy Pelosi
Member of Congress
Please do not reply to this e-mail because this mailbox is unattended.
So I checked out H.R. 676, the United States National Healthcare Act of 2009. Turns out that this is a single-payer plan. It's really simple. If we want to insure everyone and cut costs, the only way to do this is to go with a single-payer plan. What has the health insurance industry ever given us? We give them hundreds of millions of dollars a day and are lucky if they even pay for the procedures we need. Let’s cut the fat and get rid of the profit-motivated health insurance industry.
In recent weeks Big Pharma, the health insurance industry and medical supply groups have been paying teabaggers to disrupt town hall meetings across the U.S. This is passing in some circles for popular dissent (liars’ circles like Rush, and Faux News). Do not become confused by this Republican and industry lobbyist smoke and mirrors. Look at your own situation. Ask yourself, "Am I covered if I have an accident? What if I ever need high-cost procedures or lose my job?”
Why protect the insurance industry? These are the people who stand between patients and their health providers. This is a bureaucracy that is motivated not to get you care, but in the pursuit of profits at the expense of your health.
Support John Conyers, Nancy Pelosi and all other officials who support comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents.
Here's a truism: The wealthiest 1 percent have never had it so good.
According to government figures, 1 percenters' share of America's total income is the highest it's been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they've faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1 percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms. And most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.
But what really makes the ultra-wealthy so fortunate, what truly separates this moment from a run-of-the-mill Gilded Age, is the unprecedented protection the 1 percenters have bought for themselves on the most pressing issues.
To review: With 22,000 Americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, Congress is considering universal health-care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 - that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1 percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1 percenters received from the Bush tax cuts. In fact, it is so miniscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year - or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul.
Nonetheless, the 1 percenters have deployed an army to destroy the initiative.
The foot soldiers are the Land Rover Liberals. These Democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink-ribbon lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion rights. However, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic interests. Hence, this week's letter from Boulder's dot-com tycoon Rep. Jared Polis, D, and other Land Rover Liberals calling for the surtax's death.
Echoing that demand are the Corrupt Cowboys - those like Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who come from the heartland's culturally conservative and economically impoverished locales. These cavalrymen in both parties quietly build insurmountable campaign war chests as the biggest corporate fundraisers in Congress. At the same time, they publicly preen as jes' folks, make twangy references to "voters back home" and now promise to kill the health-care surtax because they say that's what their communities want.
That fantastical fairly tale, of course, couldn't exist without the Millionaire Media - the elite journalists and opinionmongers who represent corporate media conglomerates and/or are themselves extremely wealthy. Ignoring all the data about inequality, they legitimize the assertions of the 1 percenters' first two battalions, while actually claiming America's fat cats are unfairly persecuted.
Most brazenly, NBC's Meredith Vieira asks President Barack Obama why the surtax is intent on "punishing the rich"?
For his part, Obama has responded with characteristic coolness - and a powerful counter-strike. "No, it's not punishing the rich," he said. "If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that's part of being a community."
If any volley can thwart this latest attack of the 1 percenters, it is that simple idea.
David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books "Hostile Takeover" (2006) and "The Uprising" (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft. com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.
July 17th 2009
Dr Evil in “Goldman Finger”
Featured this month in the Rolling Stone Magazine “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine” Matt Taibbi explanes how Goldman Sachs and bank like them took America hostage. Just like Dr. Evil in Mike Myers’ Austin Powers films Goldman Sachs demanded “100 Million Billion Gillizilian dollars” lest we face the consequences of economic collapse.
Goldman Sachs didn’t need a “Death Ray” to extort trillions from the American people. Instead they used a series of financial schemes, commonly referred to as bubbles. These bubbles are designed to expand and then to implode, shoveling over mountians of cash into Goldman Sachs and it’s peer’s greedy mits.
Matt Taibbi dissects the Goldmanian the bubble scheme for us in Rolling Stone
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
Then once our economy was in shambles, they extorted congress to hand them over a blank check so they could buy up their competition and absorb even more capital.
Jon Stewart explains America’s current situation in yesterdays The Daily Show.
Unfortunately Austin Powers isn’t going to unravel this plan. He is in on the take. Our government officials are double agents. The people appointed to protect our economy are either Goldman Sachs alumni or totally invested in Goldman Sachs. Foxes are in charge or our financial henhouse, Taibbi explanes;
As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.
Government officials tell us that there isn’t any money for healthcare legislation, economic recovery, infrastructure and all the other things we need to improve America we now know why. It’s in the deep pockets of Dr. Evil and the masters of capital that are his peers. -Tad
July 6th 2009
ABC WTF?
June 28th 2009
Letter to Obama
Please don't give us meaningless legislation, empty rhetoric, and vacuous solutions like Bush always did. Please don't hand everything over to big pharm and the health insurance folks that have done nothing to contribute to society, only working to contribute to their bottom line. I am a freelance cinematographer and I pay for my own insurance. It's a nightmare. I am charged for everything. The payments are expensive yet I still get a giant bills for every procedure, test and examination I get. I feel like going to the doctor is like getting robbed. I would rather have a government bureaucracy running the health care system because they will be looking out for my interests; rather than a health insurance corporation bureaucracy that is only interested in profits and how best to deny coverage for me. Please surprise me Obama
Happy Birthday Jenna! Sorry I forgot I was kinda sick yesterday.
Here is the Sonia Sotomayor nomination.
(It may be down)
Many pundits are saying she is probably going to be similar to the retiring Justice Souter. Racheal Maddow disagrees. She believes Sotomayor may be more conservative a judge than many progressives would like. (I will post video soon)
May 11th 2009
May 7th 2009
A Sticky Situation
A silent film in the style of Harold Lloyd Music by Dejango Rhinehardt Michal Zarebinski, Sarah Cross, Clayton Mannix Written, directed and shot by Tad Barker Produced by Deborah Huber Shot in San Francisco CA.
a> a
May 5th 2009
Swine Flu! Run for your lives!
The way Joe Biden, the media and even regular folks are treating this like it's the new black plague. It's true that Mexico is dealing with a powerful strain of influenza that has killled 160 people. But when you look at it our Swine Flu 2009 is looking more like the regular flu on steroids.
"In the 1918-19 Avian flu pandemic, the mortality was 2.5% -- 25 times the rate we see with the seasonal arrival of flu each year of one in a thousand or 0.1%. If the 160 deaths in Mexico are truly related to swine flu and the disease is very virulent -- for example with a very high 1% mortality -- the real number of cases must be 16,000 -- not the 2,500 currently reported. On the other hand, if the new Swine flu is acting more like our seasonal flu, the real number of cases in Mexico is 160,000, 0.1% of which accounts for the 160 deaths."- Dr. Wenzel former President of the International Society for Infectious Diseases and Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.
Or is this just another conservative "be afraid of Mexico" attempt? Every spring for the past few years their is a new reason for Fox News to flip out about immigration. Remember 2006? It seems like when the chips are down for repubs they go to the old dusty chest of wedge issues; abortion, immigration (mexico), gays and guns. Get some new material.
Happy Cinco De Mayo!
March 24th 2009
March 23rd 2009
All your base are belong to us
So today Obama's Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "put it all on black" by deciding to buy all the toxic assets (aka sub prime mortgage packages) from the banks. Wall Street thought it was a great idea. The Dow jumped up almost 500 points. Paul Krugman described this plan as the same "cash for trash plan" that was already abandoned by the Bush Administration.
Of course wall street loved this plan. They get showered with more money and they won't be stuck with their bad/shadily made investments. Wasn't' that what TARP was all about? It stands for Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Aren't the sub prime mortgages the troubled assets that were supposed to be relieved with our 700 billion dollars? So basically what is going on is we give the banks 700 billion dollars AND buy up all their bad investments? What about the people who lost their houses to the banks? The banks get paid and handed all these people's property. What a scam. I call shenanigans on this one.
Eliot Spitzer brought up a good point today at Slate magazine. The decision to bail out AIG is simply a second course for the banks that have already received Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money.
Basically, AIG insured these banks against losses on their bad investments. The investments were complicated slice-and-splice mortgage security scams to basically defraud investors and bleed homeowners (they had to know what they were selling), yet we protect them against losing with our taxes.
The AIG bonuses are unacceptable, but protecting these scumbags against losing anything is intolerable. Why are we the only ones to lose?
The arrogance of Wall Street is palpable. Rick Santelli shouted on the floor of the Chichago Merchantile Exchange that ordinary Americans who face losing their homes to foreclosure are just "losers" who don't deserve any help. AIG head Edward Liddy, although apologetic, made the case that it was impossible not to pay exorbitant bonuses to the company’s executives. And the same investment banks responsible for creating this meltdown walk away with their pockets full of taxpayer money.
The experts appointed by Obama to "fix" the economy are the same people that created this mess in the first place. This is not a liquidity issue. Just because the banks are gonna walk away unharmed doesn't mean they are going to turn around and lend money. They aren't gonna wanna take risks, unless they know they will be bailed out. After this whole mess, why would taxpayers want to trust the banks?
Why not give the money to the taxpayers? If TARP money were given instead to the taxpayers, we could have all gotten a fat paycheck. $700 billion/138 million taxpayers = $5,000 for every taxpayer.
How’s that for stimulus? Then these scammers would have had to work for our business, instead of just taking from our pockets. I could use five grand right about now. What about you? If we all got rid of some debt, wouldn't that go to these banks anyway?
March 17th 2009
Whoa whoa wait. This website just reached the one year marker. It's a big number. It's a little cheated because I have been so absent recently. But with a; budding Director of Photography career in the works (lots and lots of unpaid work), money to be made to live, school, and an awesome lady in my life, I haven't time for nothing.
So one year later, how are things? Well... Obama got elected. The party was pretty short lived however due to the economic implosion that began during the election. Mortgage backed securities were a giant scam. Our economy was/is built on scams. It seems like all the experts are in on it. Is Obama is hiring these same "experts".
At least Bush is gone. No more torture no new wars. I was in seattle last week and walked past an Obey sign featuring a blimp with "war is over" on the side. When is that gonna happen?
Happy St. Patties Day
thanks for reading
March 4th 2009
Rush Limbagh is the defacto leader of the republican party. Hold on a second hahahahahaha! Really? Pathetic. Rush "european gangster costumed, ex-drug addict, racist (remember Oct 2003?), hypocrite, "riots in the streets" Limbaugh is in charge?
Tom Delay yesterday on Hardball screamed his head off at Chris Mattews yesterday that Bush wasn't responsible for our economic woes. "He didn't do anything..." is all I had to hear. He could hardly get out that it was all the fault of Fanny Mae because it is so ridicules. Yeah it was all Jimmy Carters evil plan to ruin america.
Let's get real. It's Bush's fault. We spent more than even now and got nothing in return. Yeah there is a lot of excuses, like 9-11, Katrina, and the mortgage backed securities nightmare, but all these things became bigger disasters in Bush's hands. Tax cuts for the rich and maintaining the status quo will not get us out of this. We need a sea change. The only way out of this is to put people to work. We need to cut off tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. We need to make things here again.
We need our people to have money, healthcare and security again. Sick people are a drag to the economy to business and to families. People worried about the future save. To get the wheels spinning again we need to change, and you get what you pay for, I'm talking to you; selfish, not wanting to pay your taxes, suddenly fiscal conservative, ditto heads.
March 3rd 2009
Sorry I haven't been posting. I have been really busy again. Check out my floozy band photos. I am also in production of a super 8 film and am in preproducion for the drinking games book. Also trying to find paid work is like a job in itself. The economy blows.
Obama sounded so good in his address to congress (the not so state of the union). It was music to my ears. He basically brought up everything that was awful about the Bush administration and offered a in the works solution. Wow. It is exciting. If I see you I'm giving you a high five.
Feb 23rd 2009
No TadBarker.com isn't disbanding now that we have a decent president. It may look like it. Especially since I haven't updated this thing since January (I actually added an article on the 4th but forgot to upload it ;(). But I'm still here. I'm still a broke, progressive trying to make a difference, or at least still here to bitch about our circumstances.
The economy is a problem. A problem we would have been better suited to fix with out the largest deficit ever created. Bush raided our coffers and set us up to fail. We progressives may not have exactly saw it coming (we did for the most part) but we knew all along that it would be us that had to pay in the end.
Obama is doing well so far. I think he should have spent more, ignored the republicans (they didn't even vote for it after all the concessions) and just went through with the plan. Any economist, business person, drug dealer and just about every idiot on the street can tell you that you have to spend money to make money. That pretty much explains the Republicans and their plan. Yeah tax cuts for their rich buddies worked out just great for the past eight years. It was amazing to me how much uncontested media time they got to make this case. Now Sarah Palin is trying to say "thanks but no thanks" again. Hey the fist time you said that you actually took the money, is this just more pandering? Yes.
Feb 4th 2009
Sorry the posting has been so light but I haven't had internets. But now i do. So here we go!
Dinosaurs Walk the Earth
Grunting hollering and waving their clubs, cavemen filled my television screen. Was this a Discovery Channel ancient man special re-enactment? A Geiko Insurance commercial? No it was the house republicans voicing their opposition to the proposed stimulus package. When anachronisms like; "the wealthy and small business owners are the only worthwhile people because they account for all the jobs in this country" or, "tax cuts are the only way to stimulate the economy" and, "low income people don't deserve a break, they don't even pay taxes!" were uttered, Americans disenchanted with this type of failed ideology could hear only the bloodcurdling screams of a vicious attacking pytaradyactle instead.
If people aren't buying anything what good will investments in business be? I thought we learned this lesson after eight stupid years of Bush. Have these dinosaurs heard that seven thousand of people lost their jobs this month? Added to the people who lost their jobs last year and what is believed to be a dismal the near future, unemployment is projected to hit 10 percent. This is why giving money to rich people won't stimulate the economy. Remember TARP? People don't have any money and they can't get/don't want anymore credit.
Then the king of monsters appeared. He shook the ground as he moved and his growl made all others quake. Oh he was terrible. As far as Republican Dinosaurs go, Rush Limpbaugh is Tyrannosaurus Radio Rex. It make sense in is this age of republican thunder lizards that Rush Limpbaugh is now the de facto leader of the republican party. What could swamp dwelling congress-lodocus Gingrey of Jurassic period Georgia do but to snivelingly apologize to the mighty Rex?
Then geologic time inexplicably pushed forward. It was the most amazing time lapse video. Glaciers pushed across the landscape and then receded. Rivers flowed across frame, carving canyons. Tectonic plates pushed up mountains and created oceans. The pace seemed to be picking up, then, suddenly, Robert Gibbs stepped up to the podium and the white house press conference began. I realized then that it was 2009 again and I was watching MSNBC. It was still a scary time, but I was relieved to be out of that distant past.
more to come soon
January 20th 2009
Obama I president! No more Bush. I am so happy.
January 13th 2009
Bart Cop and Bill-O's Problem with Oakland
Last Friday I was flipping through the channels on my television and what do you know, the footage from the Jan. 7 riots in Oakland was running on “The O'Reilly Factor.”
Bill O'Reilly, who has been extremely critical of San Francisco and the Bay Area in general, claimed that the protesters are out of line for coming out against the BART Police. He claims that people have the right to be upset about the execution of Oscar Grant, but should just let the BART Police figure this out in the courts. That the people of Oakland have no morals because they are upset about this obvious police brutality yet haven't protested the higher-than-national-average violent crime, "the gang problem, the downtown blight or any of the 124 murders last year.”
Bill O'Reilly has no idea what he is talking about. He just loves to attack the San Francisco Bay Area. In reality, though, the situation isn't so cut-and-dry. Not mentioned in Bill-O's report is that this is the third BART Police execution in 15 years. Also not mentioned is the BART Police’s cover-up of the murder, which was dashed to pieces by a witness's phone video. The video depicted the police officer execute an unarmed, handcuffed man, who by all accounts was complying with the officer's commands.
Bill-O didn't mention that the BART Police have absolutely no civilian oversight. Up until a couple days ago they had withheld the name of the officer in question, confiscated phone and cameras at the scene, and avoided questions about the shooting.
Bill-O just saw people rioting on TV. Has it out for the Bay Area anyway, because of what we represent, and gave us a browbeating from his regular position of arrogant ignorance. This riot is a response to the conditions in Oakland. Oakland is having real economic problems. People are upset about the violent crime, and the worst thing is that the police are exacerbating the situation. That is why we are at this boiling point.
Bill is a master at blaming the victims. All urban areas suffering from economic woes have higher-than-average levels of crime and violence. Oscar Grant, the father of a 3-year-old girl, reportedly works two jobs. This wasn't anything to do with gangs. Another cheap shot at San Francisco. Real original.
Originally posted at the Pundits Blog
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Sorry I haven't been posting. I just started classes and January has been really busy for me. Plus the weather has been great so it's hard for me to be inside. I will write more I promise.
Obama becomes President in one week!
January 7th 2009
Paul Krugman | New York Times Blog
January 6, 2009, 4:44 pm
The trouble with Sanjay Gupta
So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
January 1st 2009
Happy New Year! 2009!
I have a lot of plans for this year. I am going to try to improve this blog. First I need to get a better url. This whole /blog.html thing is not that cool. What would be cool however, is RSS feeds.
Once again thank you for reading. I am always really excited to hear people tell me that they are regular readers or that their friends read. As always if you want to contribute, comment or have questions, contact me at: its.a.blog.dog@gmail.com
Best wishes!
Tad
December 31th 2008
I posted this on The Pundits Blog early this week
Chip Saltsman, former Tennessee GOP chairman and candidate for the Republican National Committee chairmanship, thought it would be a good idea to send a copy of "Barack the Magic Negro" out with his Christmas cards.
Republicans are lining up behind him, despite the overtly racist tone of the song, saying that it is not racist; it is creative satire. It's just a little joke.
I will post the lyrics so you can decide for yourself:
Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C.
The L.A. Times, they called him that
'Cause he's not authentic like me.
Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper
Said he makes guilty whites feel good
They'll vote for him, and not for me
'Cause he's not from the ’hood.
See, real black men, like Snoop Dog,
Or me, or Farrakhan
Have talked the talk, and walked the walk,
Not come in late and won!
[refrain] Oh, Barack the Magic Negro, lives in D.C.
The L.A. Times, they called him that
'Cause he's black, but not authentically.
Oh, Barack the Magic Negro, lives in D.C.
The L.A. Times, they called him that
'Cause he's black, but not authentically.
Some say Barack's "articulate"
And bright and new and "clean."
The media sure loves this guy,
A white interloper's dream!
But when you vote for president,
Watch out, and don't be fooled!
Don't vote the Magic Negro in —
'Cause —
[spoken word] 'Cause I won't have nothing after all these years of sacrifice, and I won't get justice. This is about justice. This isn't about me, it's about justice.
It's about buffet. I don't have no buffet and there won't be any church contributions, and there'll be no cash in the collection plate.
There ain't gonna be no cash money, no walkin'-around money, no phoning money.
Now, Barack going to come in here and —
This song is racist. Just because you are pretending to be Al Sharpton doesn't turn your bigotry into witty satire. It's basically saying that there are "real" and "fake" black people, that the real ones are inner-city and poor, are radicals or rappers. That black leaders only care about ripping off their flock. Come on — the term "white interloper" is in there.
When George Bush was president, Republicans would always get all offended when Bush was criticized or made fun of. They would say, "This is offensive. You can disagree with the president, but you still have to respect the office of the president of the United States.”
Where are these guys now? Republicans are standing up behind Saltsman. Repeating that it's only a joke. Where are all these classy guys who get offended when the office of the POTUS isn't respected? Oh yeah, that's right, they never really cared about that — they just didn't like it when their guy was the butt of a joke.
On the conservative blogs, I read that people really think Obama was elected because white people voted for him so they would no longer feel guilty about historical racism. Really? It's weird that I have never heard that from a white person who voted for Obama, only from racist whites who voted for McCain. These people are so out of touch.
This is probably the last thing that the Republican Party needs. Their party is becoming smaller and smaller. They are old, white and Southern. A cohort that is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the U.S. With this sense of humor, who besides these folks would want to join the Republican Party?
Will the Republican Party shrivel up and die? Probably not, but a good way to help the GOP commit slow suicide would be to defend Chip Saltsman and this awful song.
December 25th 2008
Merry Christmas! I have been hella lazy and haven't written for too long.
So what's been going on?
The economy is headed off a cliff! Oh No!
Rod Blagojevich was caught on tape talking about selling Obama's Senate seat. Obama has been implicated by the media simply because they come from the same town. (Sean Hannity screams "but they talked! one time").
Kim Jong-Ill had a stroke. North Korea says he's doing fine, out and about; hittin' up photo ops, military demos and pleasure palaces. S'all good in the 'hood.
SlumDog Millionaire was awesome! Danny Boyle is a genius. I thought it wasn't going to be good because the comercials were so bad. But it completely took me by suprise. It was dope. Also the sound track has a lot of MIA.
I added a couple new links. Cartoon sites I stumbled on this week.
That is all i got. Happy New Years!
December 16th 2008
We've been had!
Remember when Henry Paulson sat down in front of Congress and begged for $700 billion to bail out banks drowning in bad mortgage-backed securities? How he promised that the money would be used to buy out these bad assets so that these banks could remain viable and continue to make loans? How Congress made certain that there was a clause to assure Americans that public money would not be used to dole out multimillion-dollar bonuses for CEOs and bank executives?
We've been had! Credit is still dry as a bone, the mortgage crisis is still at Defcon 4, and the banks took the money and ran. Paulson changed the wording in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) agreement so that companies that accepted government money in mortgage-backed security auctions would have to limit executive pay. Instead of buying these securities at auction, Paulson just gave the $35 billion TARP first installment to the banks directly.
The whole auction thing went right out the window. So what Paulson and the Bush administration did was created a legal loophole in order to ignore the obvious intent of the law. Basically they lied to our faces, took our wallets and distributed the contents to their friends. A scam that is, from what I hear so far, completely legal.
This is just another example of Naomi Klein's disaster capitalism theory. Klein asserts that corrupt governments like the Bush administration use the general public's shock, created by national disasters, to push through unpopular legislation. This legislation is used, in many cases, to further enrich the already wealthy and powerful. In this case $700 billion was handed directly from the coffer to the open hands of bankers, whose greed and poor decisions got us into this mess in the first place. (Check out Klein's The Shock Doctrine, it’s a good read.)
What do we do now? Will there be any money left for Obama to use to save the economy? Will there be anything left to save? Bush promised an easy transition, yet it seems like Obama will have his hands full just fixing all the things Bush is messing up on his way out. Someone should be going to jail for this. It's a $700 billion scam! Bernard Madoff's $50B "Ponzi" scheme looks like peanuts next to this. It took every ounce of restraint I had, when Rachel Maddow played B-roll of Bush and Paulson at a press conference, not to throw my shoe at my roommate's TV.
December 14th 2008
This is a farewell kiss you dog!
December 11th 2008
Bush relaxes protections for endangered species
By Dina Cappiello
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is reducing protections for endangered animals and plants.
Just six weeks before Democratic President-elect Barack Obama takes office, the current Republican administration is changing endangered species regulations.
Some mandatory, independent reviews that government scientists have performed for 35 years are being eliminated. The scientists' advice from such reviews can delay or block dams, highways and other projects.
The new rules will take effect in about 30 days. The rules also prohibit federal agencies from evaluating the effect on endangered species and the places they live from a project's contribution to increased global warming.
Obama has promised to reverse the new rules. Congress also could overturn them.
Wow. This guy is one evil son of a bitch.
December 8th 2008
Trickle-Dumb Economics
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer criticized Obama's FDR-like stimulus plan today, wondering if spending money, with the economy in such bad shape, was a bad idea. Obama plans to spend up to a trillion dollars to get the economy back on track. The MSM and Republicans, however, have been very critical of the new stimulus plan.
As any businessperson will tell you, "You gotta spend money to make money.” These people talk to business people, right? Maybe that’s the problem. We enabled these guys with self-regulation, and now, like drug addicts on the street, American business executives are begging for money with their hands out. We go and hand it over.
The old Regan trickle-down mentality is alive and kicking. It should be shot in the back of the head for getting us into this mess in the first place. Voodoo economics isn't viable. It is a thinly disguised ploy to transfer wealth directly to the top.
Obama's plan will put people to work, improve the country and, possibly, even give money to consumers directly. It's not rocket science. If people have money, they pay their bills. The companies that issued these bills get paid (including the banks that so badly need our assistance). The result is both the banks and regular Americans are back in the black.
Contrast it to the Bush Plan. How is this trickle-down method supposed to work? Bush writes a $3 trillion check to the banks; they shore up their books. Struggling Americans are still screwed. Credit is still dry, no one is hiring and they still can't pay their mortgages or their credit card bills or buy stuff for the kids for the holidays. Depressing.
Of course we chose the trickle-down route. After the first installment, we have failed to free up credit, job numbers are at a 30-year low, the banks are still in the red and are now asking for more, and now our auto industry is about to fail. But now, no, we don't have money for a stimulus package.
In light of the bank bailout, a trillion dollars should be no problem, especially since this has a chance to save our economy. This money is spent on improving America's schools and infrastructure, but even if this isn't the silver bullet that saves the economy, the effects will be infinitely greater to most Americans than will the effects of the $3 trillion we handed to the banks.
As Chris Matthews said a couple weeks ago, money for rich people gets spent no questions asked — but when we want programs that help regular people, like healthcare, schools and now this stimulus package, we can't afford it. Hopefully this trickle-dumb mentality ends with George W. Bush (it won't). If Obama wants to hit the ground running, he should kick in the stimulus plan as soon as the rubber touches the asphalt.
Today the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that we have been in recession since December of last year. During the last year, however, politicians and the MSM seemed to do everything they could to conceal the truth.
Maybe it was in the context of the election — think "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" — or in the interest of not shaking the timid Mr. Dow Jones. But wouldn't it have been a better decision for the country if the media and those in power had laid this out straight in the beginning? Then people could have saved for this Christmas and prepared better for the future. If we were told earlier, we could have made way more prudent choices in 2008. Where was the National Bureau of Economic Research all this year?
I am aware that up-to-date data is difficult to round up and analyze, and that negative numbers adversely affect the numbers on Wall Street, but looking back, it seems like this lack of information has worked harder to exacerbate our economic situation than to protect and increase investment.
Fortunately, Americans saw these problems on the horizon in their own lives and change won on Nov. 4. The implications of this decision, however, will be interesting to see. (Which way will Obama go? It seemed from his campaign that we would see investment in America and Americans, but with his recent Cabinet appointments and rumors of retaining the Bush tax cuts, the status quo may live on.)
But it is very concerning to me. The people we trust to keep us informed and protect us from harm skirted their responsibilities in order to keep us on the wrong track (it doesn't surprise me). We need our elected officials and our "free press" to give us the right information in a timely manner. Lying to us may keep you in power in the short term, but America can't continue this short-term thinking. We need to come out ahead in the long run (the Big Three automakers and business in general also needs to learn this important lesson).
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December 1st 2008
Deficits and the Future
by: Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Right now there's intense debate about how aggressive the United States government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large fiscal expansion to keep the economy from going into free fall. Others, however, worry about the burden that large budget deficits will place on future generations.
But the deficit worriers have it all wrong. Under current conditions, there's no trade-off between what's good in the short run and what's good for the long run; strong fiscal expansion would actually enhance the economy's long-run prospects.
The claim that budget deficits make the economy poorer in the long run is based on the belief that government borrowing "crowds out" private investment - that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy's long-run rate of growth. Under normal circumstances there's a lot to this argument.
But circumstances right now are anything but normal. Consider what would happen next year if the Obama administration gave in to the deficit hawks and scaled back its fiscal plans.
Would this lead to lower interest rates? It certainly wouldn't lead to a reduction in short-term interest rates, which are more or less controlled by the Federal Reserve. The Fed is already keeping those rates as low as it can - virtually at zero - and won't change that policy unless it sees signs that the economy is threatening to overheat. And that doesn't seem like a realistic prospect any time soon.
What about longer-term rates? These rates, which are already at a half-century low, mainly reflect expected future short-term rates. Fiscal austerity could push them even lower - but only by creating expectations that the economy would remain deeply depressed for a long time, which would reduce, not increase, private investment.
The idea that tight fiscal policy when the economy is depressed actually reduces private investment isn't just a hypothetical argument: it's exactly what happened in two important episodes in history.
The first took place in 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt mistakenly heeded the advice of his own era's deficit worriers. He sharply reduced government spending, among other things cutting the Works Progress Administration in half, and also raised taxes. The result was a severe recession, and a steep fall in private investment.
The second episode took place 60 years later, in Japan. In 1996-97 the Japanese government tried to balance its budget, cutting spending and raising taxes. And again the recession that followed led to a steep fall in private investment.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that trying to reduce the budget deficit is always bad for private investment. You can make a reasonable case that Bill Clinton's fiscal restraint in the 1990s helped fuel the great U.S. investment boom of that decade, which in turn helped cause a resurgence in productivity growth.
What made fiscal austerity such a bad idea both in Roosevelt's America and in 1990s Japan were special circumstances: in both cases the government pulled back in the face of a liquidity trap, a situation in which the monetary authority had cut interest rates as far as it could, yet the economy was still operating far below capacity.
And we're in the same kind of trap today - which is why deficit worries are misplaced.
One more thing: Fiscal expansion will be even better for America's future if a large part of the expansion takes the form of public investment - of building roads, repairing bridges and developing new technologies, all of which make the nation richer in the long run.
Should the government have a permanent policy of running large budget deficits? Of course not. Although public debt isn't as bad a thing as many people believe - it's basically money we owe to ourselves - in the long run the government, like private individuals, has to match its spending to its income.
But right now we have a fundamental shortfall in private spending: consumers are rediscovering the virtues of saving at the same moment that businesses, burned by past excesses and hamstrung by the troubles of the financial system, are cutting back on investment. That gap will eventually close, but until it does, government spending must take up the slack. Otherwise, private investment, and the economy as a whole, will plunge even more.
The bottom line, then, is that people who think that fiscal expansion today is bad for future generations have got it exactly wrong. The best course of action, both for today's workers and for their children, is to do whatever it takes to get this economy on the road to recovery.
