Gelignite Frugal Futility

Gelignite Frugal Futility


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Apparently now, Republicans feel they have a mandate since clobbering the Democrats in this 2014 off-year election. From this they’re lining up with so-called political capital in clenched fists along with taxpayer dollars in stuffed pockets to be first in line to push their own agendas.

Oh I just s’pose that is the usual response of norm for any party’s victory in flouting a winning election cycle, but it is in the agenda that distinguishes the vast difference. Republicans are poised to repeal Obamacare, deregulate financial rulings again (even seek deregulations that led to the ‘Great Recession’), privatize Social Security and Medicare, cut infrastructure budgets to support the richest tax breaks, take down immigration reform and intensify the remaining two Benghazi investigations even though a Republican controlled House committee found absolutely no “wrong doing” just this past November.

The thing here is that the GOP has been so successful in getting the susceptible to believe anything they hear that the Republican’s misinformation assault has hooked ‘em line and sinker in the constant onslaught of showered deceit.


Republican’s incessant chaos then laying the blaming finger pointed elsewhere has managed to utterly confuse the voting public that they imputed most of the obfuscation in politics onto Democrats and Obama this election cycle.

Seriously though, have you looked at who Republicans have voted into office? There’s Representative Michael Grimm (R-NY) who was easily reelected by a 13.3% margin even though he was indicted for tax evasion that he has since plead guilty to and resigned. He even threatened to throw reporter, Michael Scotto off the congressional House rotunda’s balcony after saying he’d break him in half. This, Grimm did while on camera no less.

Senator-elect Tom Cotton (R-AR) would not answer one question honestly, instead only going to talking points bashing Obama, Obamacare and his opponent Senator Mark Pryor. One of the innumerable examples of this was in the Arkansas senate debate. A reporter asked Cotton if he was responsible for any dishonesty in campaign ads. Immediately Cotton resorts to his usual litany of profuse anti-Obama slurs. Exasperated, the reporter interrupted him asking, “Are you answering my question about what your job as a candidate is? Or are you just doing talking points?” Fortunately for Cotton, the conservative moderator jumped in rescuing him from having to answer by telling the reporter, “I have to allow him to go ahead because we have no provision for a follow-up question right away.” Thus Cotton proceeded back to vituperating all things Obama.

Pig castrating ALEC member Senator-elect Joni Ernst (R-IA) had enough voters to align themselves around her many lies that she won the Iowa senate seat. She is willing to publicly support huge corporate tax breaks while derailing any thoughts of a minimum wage increase state or federal.

When businessman senator-elect David Perdue (R-GA) was asked to defend his outsourcing as CEO of various corporations like ‘Pillowtex’ on the campaign trail, he replied, “Defend it? I’m proud of it.” Later when asked under oath about his career in outsourcing, Perdue states, “Yeah, I spent most of my career doing that.” Then shortly after during the Georgia senate debate, the moderator asked Perdue, “Have you outsourced jobs in your career?” He merely replied with a resounding, “No!”

You have Governors Sam Brownback (R-KA), Scott Walker (R-WI) and Rick Scott (R-FL) that have all tanked their respective state’s economies, but yet all were reelected by the Republican vote.

Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) flat-out lied on Fox News just before the elections claiming that he knew of ten ISIL terrorists that have crossed U.S. southern borders just before the elections simply to scare folks. But yet, he still was easily reelected. Amazing!

Congresswoman-elect Jody Hice (R-GA) states that American Muslims deserve no first amendment rights. Congressman Glen Grothman (R-WI), who will give Louie Gohmert (R-TX) a run for the dumbest congressional statements, has called for the elimination of African American holidays such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, stating they are an “insult” and should be treated with “contempt.”      

Among these and the many others, my favorite though is Chaplin Gordon Klingenschmitt who was elected by Republican voters to Colorado’s 15th House district. Klingenschmitt believes in exorcism and actually put on an exorcism performance, albeit long distance, to exorcise the demons haunting Obama’s soul.


Can you imagine? Congress now has twenty plus more Bachmann, Gohmert and Stevie King Tea Partiers to contend with. With mounting belly aching and comical antics, legislation is going to be a gully backwashed animal house. Move over Belushi…
  
They say one reaps what they sow, but all Americans will reap this Republican victory that is filled with average folk sorrows. But that is where you can blame Democrats as well. They didn’t stand for any message and backed off instead of challenging Republican nonsense. Democrats distanced themselves from Obama and still lost. Democrats like Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) who let it be known she was for the XL Pipeline, embraced Republican mandates and still lost.        

All this created voter apathy displaying an historic low turnout unmatched since the years of WWII. This 2014 midterm elections voter turnout was a mere 36.4% according to the ‘United States Election Project’. The dismal voter turnout has not been matched since the year 1942 where only 33.9% of eligible voters turned out, but there was a world war going on that year.

So, it’s really difficult to say Republicans won the American voter’s heart. ‘Washington Post’ exit poll data shows that voters who voted this election cycle, 75% were white with that majority being southern white. 12% of the voters were black, 8% were Hispanic with 3% of Asian voters. Of the white vote, 57% were male. With minority groups like Latinos showing the fastest growth rates, an 8% turnout was paltry.

From these results, it appears that the big Republican win was just as much about those who didn’t vote as much as it is of those who did, for one other statistic is that the ones who voted, 54% said they viewed the Republican Party unfavorably.

The development here is that once in power, Republicans will blatantly reveal themselves of who they truly are making the voting public so disgusted the real voter wave turnout will come in 2016 to flush the vermin out of office.

The best advice until then…be patient…     

Sacrosanct Err:
A model of courage and honesty in office.” That’s what soon to be senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to say about former Senator Edward Brooke’s (R-MA) passing this past Saturday 01/03/15. Brooke was the first African American to hold office in the senate since the Reconstruction years. He was a very liberal Republican pushing heavily on equal rights, racial integration, economic fairness, had a federal housing amendment named after him and was the first Republican to urge Nixon to resign.

How can McConnell even credit Brooke when he and today’s Republicans totally fight against what Brooke stood for and how can he even recognize “honesty in office” when in his reelection bid, McConnell had a fraudulent mailer sent out to potential Democrat voters in eastern Kentucky with the bold title, ‘ELECTION VIOLATION NOTICE’ proclaiming a grave warning in stating, “You are at risk of acting on fraudulent information.” It was all merely dirty and dishonest politics.

45% of his latest twenty-two public statements have been false and another 18% deceitful as gauged by the conservative affiliate ‘Politifact’.

Besides all his political moves that ignored the nation reeling from the Republican induced ‘Great Recession’, let’s have a look at a few of McConnell’s lies, the one who is now to run the senate.

The [Kynect] website can continue, but in my view the best interests of the country would be achieved by pulling out Obamacare root and branch.”

McConnell said this during a debate in Kentucky with Allison Lundergan Grimes where Kynect is vastly popular. The point is ‘Kynect’ is Obamacare.

Creating the worst form of obstructionism any president has had to face coming from the senate in American history, McConnell had this to say in defending it in attempts to block Obama appointed judicial nominees.

First he had previously stated, “Any president's judicial nominees, after full debate, deserve a simple up-or-down vote.” Then when Majority Leader Harry Reid invokes the ‘nuclear option’ to counter Republicans incessant filibusters, McConnell in a furious state says this countering his former pledge, “This is nothing more than a power grab. They broke the Senate rules in order to exercise a power grab.”

Naturally though, when W. Bush, a Republican was in the executive chair, McConnell had this to say in 2005, “Any president’s judicial nominees, after full and fair debate, receive a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. It is time to move away from advice and obstruct and get back to advise and consent.”

Just look at the graph below and see how prejudicial and detrimental McConnell’s Republican minority has been to this president’s and nation’s judicial confirmation seating. S’long to the up-or-down vote…


In the Obamacare implementation battles, McConnell proclaimed, “Some in Congress seem to be in such a rush to pass just any reform, rather than the right reform, that they’re looking everywhere for the money to pay for it—even if it means sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare. They are going to pay for this plan by cutting Medicare that is cutting seniors. The administration plans to use Medicare cuts to fund yet another new government program.”

Of course that was absolutely false then as it is now. In fact, the ACA healthcare law specifically forbids Medicare benefit cuts and is actually saving Medicare recipients $4,200.00/yr. per person over the next ten years.

But naturally when it comes to Medicare, McConnell never stated what he has wanted done to it. For four straight years McConnell along with forty senate Republicans voted for Representative Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget that includes privatizing and rationing Medicare for 47 million American senior users. McConnell also aligned himself with Newt Gingrich to slash 15% off the Medicare budget when Gingrich was Speaker of the House.

He also doesn’t note that prior to Obamacare, 44,789 uninsured Americans on average per year went to their grave. This figure is from the studies published by the “American Journal of Public Health’. That was prior Obamacare, for post there was a study published in ‘Annals of Internal Medicine’ that shows for every 830 folks who gain health coverage under the ACA law, one life will be saved where otherwise they would have died.

What about now?  With McConnell implementing years of obstruction, most of the progress Obama and Democrats were initiating to reboot the economy is at present doing fairly well due to what little progressive policies managed to go around the Republican block. But it just makes one wonder what if there was some honest bipartisanship on the part of Republicans where we would actually be today.

Well, McConnell wants to steal credit and lay the current economic uptick to the recent Republican election results. He said this day of 01/08/15, “After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope; the uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama Administration's long tenure in Washington, the expectation of a new Republican Congress. So this is precisely the right time to advance a positive, pro-growth agenda.”

The gastrointestinal nerve in him must be infecting any sense of reason to boast of such a false claim. To actually proclaim the improving economy as a result of your own failures when in actuality you are the one directly responsible for thwarting progress through incessant denials, filibusters and obstructionism is tantamount to the highest degree in dishonesty. McConnell is one of the main culprits who hindered economic growth as implicated by him when he stated in 2008, “Top priority; make Obama a one term president.”

McConnell’s sole agenda was to disagree on anything and everything the Obama administration put out to heal the nation from the effects of the ‘Great Recession’s stranglehold.     

Of course McConnell is lying when it comes to fixing a problem he incurred. The debt ceiling crisis, the fiscal cliff, the sequester, the government shutdown…all these ‘things’ were Republican sponsored by their own devious deeds, but all these ‘things’ Republicans shirked off in being not responsible for while pointing all the blame squarely on the backs of Democrats. Republicans are masters of deceit.

In McConnell attempting to give Republicans credit for the improving economy, when it has actually been their policies that have stymied it, I like what senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer compared McConnell’s fictitious analogy to.

Pfeiffer came back with a quote from former NBA basketball player, Stacey King when after an historic game King played in he said afterwards, “I’ll always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined for 70 points.” In the game referred to here, Michael Jordan scored 69 points where King scored 1.    


Look, McConnell and Republicans prophesized many dire predictions after President Obama won reelection. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) in March 2012 said that gas prices would be $5.45 per gallon by 2015 with Obama as president; the national average today has fallen a record 102 straight days and is currently $2.20 per gallon. Wherein states like Missouri it’s selling at $1.82 per gallon…and see…we never needed the XL Pipeline to lower gasoline prices after all did we…

Mitt Romney late in the 2012 presidential campaign when unemployment was 8.1% claimed that if Obama was reelected, you’re going to see chronic high unemployment continue four years or more. Where Romney claimed he would get unemployment down to 6% by 2017 with his policies, today in the first days of 2015 under Obama, unemployment currently stands at 5.8%.

After Obama was just reelected, conservatist guru economist Charles Bilderman wrote that due to the election results Obama’s second term policies would “crash stocks.” Investor Marc Faber claimed that the “stock market would drop at least 20%” and suggested that investors wanting to protect their assets “should buy themselves a machine gun.” At the first of the New Year, the ‘Dow Jones Industrial Average’ stood at 17,823; up over 35% since Obama was reelected.

On Obamacare, all Republicans claimed no one would pay for their health insurance. House Republicans on the House and Energy Committee claimed this, then they held a hearing to proclaim it, but it didn’t work out that way. Concerning the over 8 million enrollees in the new healthcare law, insurance executives lined up telling congress that 80-90% of those enrolled are paying their premiums. The House Republicans little hearing appears to have backfired big time.

Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH) in November 2013 charged that Obamacare is “a rolling calamity that must be scrapped” and added, “When you step back and look at the totality of this, I don’t think it’s ever going to work.” Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) said, “It’s going to go down, down, and then you are looking at, to me, a massive government bailout of this entire health care law.” Conservative strategist, Bill Kristol claims, “Obamacare is failing and will fail.”

The buttered flab that barred the fat lady from singing though was Donnie J. Trump. In the tweet below (boy-howdy he does love his tweets), Trump yelped:



Unfortunately for the Republican doomsayer, the Dow Jones Industrial as of late has been hovering just under 18,000 up 35% since Obama’s reelection. The current U.S. dollar index (value against other currencies) has reached a four year high at 92.53 on the NYE:DXY.         

For another matter, according to fury by Rush Limbaugh, since Obama was reelected the whole economy is going to collapse. Just before Obama won reelection in 2012, Limbaugh blurted out, “The country’s economy is going to collapse if Obama is reelected. There’s no if about this. And it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be gut wrenching, but it will happen.”

He even went so far as to state how it would occur by predicting, “California is going to declare bankruptcy and Obama would force states like Texas to bail them out.” Limbaugh further boasted that you should better skippy well believe him because as he proclaims, “I know mathematics and I know economics. I know history. I know socialism, statism, Marxism, I know where it goes. I know what happens at the end of it.”

Sounds more like he should stick to what he knows best…babbling…for if he ever gets taken down from fouling the airwaves with his jukebox junked mouth, there’s certainly not another job awaiting him in mathematics, economics or history.

In 2014’s 3rd Quarter, America’s GDP grew an annualized 3.5%; higher than any other industrialized nation. Today, America’s economy is experiencing the fewest job losses since 1997. America has witnessed nearly 70 straight weeks of economic growth and as a result of that the U.S. economy grew a very comfortable 5.0% in the 3rd Quarter of 2014.

Oh, and as for California…currently the state has a $4 billion budget surplus ranking far better than most red states such as Kansas, Arizona and the Republican controlled legislative states of Wisconsin and New Jersey.

Alas, as if this isn’t enough, the moral majority religious right got into the GOP foray of predicting end days due to Obama’s reelection. Mega-might evangelical preacher Frank Graham felt that God will ruin our economy thanks to the majority of American voters reelecting Obama.

Just after the 2012 election results the Reverend Franklin Graham preaches, “In the last four years, we have begun to turn our backs on God. Maybe God will have to bring our nation down to our knees—to where you just have a complete economic collapse. And maybe at that point, maybe people will again begin to call upon the name of almighty God.”

Just what is it that makes the fundamental Christian feel Obama is such a threat if it has nothing to do with bigotry?

So, since Obama’s inaugural election all job losses from the ‘Great Recession’ have been erased. Under Obama, federal spending has risen more slowly than the rate of inflation, petroleum imports are down 48% and believe it or not, fewer SNAP recipients have been added under Obama thus far than under W. Bush’s tenure.

Hands down, this president has done more with less congressional input, but tons of congressional resistance than any other president has encountered.  

Distinctly Dumbed:
The very first item to put on the table of the new senate Republican majority, one would think that it might be concerning jobs, immigration reform or even law and order. But no, the number one priority for Republicans, even though they know full well the president’s veto pen is aimed dead target on its sites is to build the dad-gummed XL pipeline.

As mentioned earlier, it has nothing to do with lower gas prices as the barrel price of crude oil has fallen steeply from $102.00 per barrel to currently $48.36 per barrel without the pipeline. It cannot make us independent as we already have a glut of domestic oil, oil is speculated on the global market and it will not create any fair amount of permanent jobs, unless you consider around 54 as a lot of jobs.

Whenever Republicans claim it will create thousands of jobs, they’re deceitfully only accounting for the temporary 14,000 construction workers in building it. Do note; that is ‘temporary’ jobs for a generation’s worth of potential environmental disasters if it is built. But even that is minimal, as in just one month of November 2014 alone…14,000 construction jobs were created in the U.S.

Senate Republicans are touting it as infrastructure. Now all Americans know that word and know that it needs being attended to, but to direct the word in describing a dang pipeline…that’s really dumb. What Americans expect in infrastructure is to address all the crumbling bridges and potholed highways that are plaguing the country.

No, why Republicans really want the pipeline built is not on behalf of common folk, it is for the ones who have padded their pockets such as the Canadian energy company ‘TransCanada’, all the scores of lobbyists pushing for its construction and the Koch Brothers who stand to gain billions in its construction in owning all land rights surrounding the tar sands mining.

Where is the moral authority or public trust? In fact, Republicans are gearing up toward Koch goals to abuse, degrade and even destroy the very resources that sustain us; namely land, water and air. This is tantamount to treachery for our future generations. The more we cut, make extinct, mow down and pollute these life sustaining resources, nature will prevail and we as part of life will pay dearly, for nature always corrects its problem...which is currently us. 
 
The Koch Brothers have sought personal gain through influence into finance and politics via front groups in lobbying and advocacy action. Their main agendas are to pump money into Republican campaigns and lobbying against climate change and universal healthcare.

The Koch Brothers are the key donors to conservative think tanks and political advocacy organizations like the ‘Heritage Foundation’, the ‘American Legislative Exchange Council’ (ALEC), the ‘Federalist Society’, ‘Cato Institute’, ‘Freedom Works’, ‘Americans for Prosperity’, ‘Freedom Partners’ and one might as well include the ‘Republican Party’ as a wholly soul-owned subsidiary of the Koch Brothers.

Republicans are so deep in with the Koch’s where they are frozen in primary elections courting anything the brother’s want because if the Koch’s support their opponent, whether a long term incumbent or freshman, that opponent usually wins. It’s so apparent now they’ve coined a term for it known as “getting primaried.”

Republicans like to admonish the Hungarian-born American businessman George Soros as profiteering for the left, so, incessantly attack him. But let’s look at the Koch Brothers and Soros side-by-side.


As the graph above illustrates, from 1998 to 2010, the Koch Brothers outspent Soros in lobbying expenditures by over 22%. In the combinational institutional lobbying efforts by the brothers they have spent $57.4 million to Soros’ personal fund management of $860 thousand combined with the Soros funded ‘Open Society Policy Center’ of $11,930.00 for a total of $12.8 million. Funny that; ya know, how the GOP seems to always skip over that.       

The Republican House is at it too. Their first agenda of course was to attack Obamacare through legislation as if their fifty-five times before hasn’t been enough.

To go after Obamacare again the Republican majority House passed a bill calling it, ‘Save Americans Workers Act.’ As usual under Republican fictitious employment bills, the implied name has nothing to do with American workers, but all to do with making corporate and financial institutions wealthier and more powerful.

On Tuesday, January 06, 2015 Representative Paul Ryan announced that the House bill would enable “more people [to] work full time.”  This bill will actually create the opposite effect. The bill is a “fix” to weaken Obamacare in changing the definition of full-time work from 30 hours back to 40 hours per week.

As it currently stands, all employers with 50 or more employees must provide insurance to 95% of the workers or pay a fine. With full-time work being moved to 40 hours, American workers will lose their work sponsored healthcare benefits. Along with raising the limit below 40 hours as part time to preclude healthcare coverage, corporations now have incentive to even cut into 40 hour work weeks down to say 35 hours excluding even more workers from insurance benefits. Directly this would impact 7% of workers currently working under 40 hours and could indirectly impact another 44% of workers who work 40 hour weeks.

This is an appetizer for employers to cut worker hours thus lowering paycheck amounts and totally eliminate health benefits. While the ‘U.S. Chamber of Commerce’ welcomes this bill, the ‘Congressional Budget Office’ (CBO) has come out with figures stating the bill, if it ever becomes law, will add $53 billion to the national deficit over the next decade.

House Republicans have also bundled previously DOA (dead on arrival) financial deregulation bills into a ‘super bill’ that will allow corporate fraud to occur while giving impunity to executive officers who committed the fraud.

When it comes to taxes, Republicans are pushing bills that will hinder the ‘Congressional Budget Office’ (CBO) and the ‘Joint Committee on Taxation’ (JCT) from reporting simplified actuarial data. Republicans are insisting the CBO and JCT included forego fiscal policy on actual known statistics and include proposed legislation that is not even a bill yet much less law. This egregious GOP spoof is being called ‘dynamic scoring’.

To do this the CBO and JCT must abandon long accepted practices to finding data and become clairvoyant or even telepathic in reaching conclusions. Of course, even though both agencies are bipartisan, Republicans do not like them as the CBO has shown the Bush trickle-down-effect era did not stimulate the nation’s economy while proving the cost savings found in the ACA law.     

The JCT tracks revenue and has pointed out specifically how the W. Bush tax cuts wiped out the 1990’s surplus earnings creating one of the nation’s largest deficits that led to the ‘Great Recession’ prompting unprecedented income inequality that is still choking the U.S.

In fact, the senate Republican majority have decided not to reappoint CBO director, Douglass Elemendorf, who although is a Republican himself has maintained a stellar bipartisan policy since the 1990s and without doubt emphatically opposes ‘dynamic scoring’ policies currently pursued by Republicans.

Essentially what Republicans are attempting to do here is mask over tax cuts for the extremely rich. As we know from the previous W. Bush administration, this will again swell the deficit, but it won’t be able to be proven that it was due to wealthy tax cuts as they will be hidden from data collectors such as the CBO and JCT.

If Republicans are so gun-ho for wealthy tax cuts, well what about the average American?

President Obama this coming Tuesday is going to announce his plan to give American workers a break with a tax cut. Are Republicans for it; in one word…nope…in fact, they’re lining up to condemn it.

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) had his office spokesperson Brendan Buck state, “This is not a serious proposal. We lift families up and grow the economy with a simpler, flatter tax code, not big tax increases to pay for more Washington spending.”

The flat tax code Buck is speaking of is in Ryan’s budget proposal. What it does is cover wealthy tax cut costs by burdening the middleclass making under $200,000.00/yr. The middleclass would lose their deductions for mortgages and charitable giving while facing tax increases averaging $3,000.00/yr. All this is broken down nicely by ‘The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ concerning Ryan’s budget.

Republicans profess they are for tax cuts for the average American, not just for the wealthy, but who do they fight for and who do they ignore? Sure they wail when Obama wants to tax the wealthy to give a fairer share, insisting the president wants to tax the “American people” and it is not the right time. Republicans lump it as if the president is taxing everyone.  

If Republicans are truly for fewer taxes on the middleclass and lower, then why did they allow unemployment to die off and why is the Ryan budget geared to tax American workers while giving corporations to pay less in taxation with more tax shelters?

In Obama’s State of the Union Speech he will bring up taxing the rich by raising inheritance and investment taxes that will aid and pay for middleclass and poor tax cuts. It will be interesting in how the muddled GOP response will be if they are for “less taxes for the American people.”

Even though there is nothing to defund, House Republicans voted to defund immigration and stymie immigration reform. House Republicans have just passed Representatives, Diane Black (R-TN) and Ted Poe’s (R-TX) ‘Separation of Powers Act’ bill to defund immigration. Just before passage Poe stated, “This legislation will allow Congress to exercise its ‘check’ on an out-of-control White House that treats the Constitution as a mere suggestion, not the law of the land.”

Ya see that’s a huge problem and most definitely a conundrum for Republicans, for here in the U.S., immigration services have nothing to do in being funded by congress; Immigration self-funds itself through fees collected from immigrant applicants.

In the past twenty years Republicans have voted against all veteran bills and have attempted to block any increased funding for veteran programs until this past June when they helped pass Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) healthcare bill into law. It was the same bill that they had successfully blocked in February of last year, the only difference is in between the two February and June votes, the VA scandal had erupted. With major heat emanating from the scandal and attempting to lay all the years of VA abuse squarely on the back of Obama, for the moment, the GOP didn’t want to be perceived as anti-veteran for the new law allows sick veterans to visit private doctors if vet doctors aren’t available.

Still the GOP moaned about it. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) whined, “I feel strongly we’ve got to do the right thing for our veterans. But I don’t think we should create a blank check, an unlimited entitlement program, now.” McConnell even attempted to attach an amendment to extend Iran sanctions that would have poisoned the bill.   

Republicans have fought tooth ‘n’ nail to block any bill related to soldiers and veterans. They blocked the ‘Veterans Jobs Corp’ bill, the ‘Enlist Act’, the ‘Clay Hunt Veteran Suicide’ bill, H.R. 1168 ‘Veterans Retraining Act’, a disabled veteran’s home improvement bill in H.R. 1293 and the H.R. 1171 bill that was to address the needs of homeless veterans…these and much more have been blocked by Republicans. Yet, we voted all these Republicans back into office.     
     
Unsound Reasoning:
It just seems that as the rest of the world is progressing, such as Pope Francis publicly chiding the Vatican bureaucracy for its complacency over the poor’s struggles, feckless conservatism and judgmental ineptitudes…America’s far-right political system is actually grabbing hold of these sunders taking the nation back down the more primitive path.

Under Obama, TARP and his stimulus package spent $426.4 billion and had a return of $441.7 billion; a nice payback profit of $15.3 billion. The auto industry loan alone has saved millions of jobs with America’s car manufacturers turning out 16.5 million vehicles, the best since pert near a decade.

Just a couple of weeks after voters turned their noses on Democrats, the U.S. government sold off its stake in the auto financing company ‘Ally Financial’ formerly known as ‘GMAC’. The government also turned a little profit on that too of $2.4 billion.

Yet, no one is giving the Obama administration any credit in having the foresight in doing the necessary work by turning things around under insurmountable obstruction reared by the recession’s tentacles while topped off with an obstinate Republican portion of congress.

The economic recessionary environment zipping ever closer to a full blown depression alone would have discouraged most at what Obama has had to do to offset the recession’s reaches, much less in also battling the unnecessary political obstinacy.

Let’s not forget where we were when Obama first entered the White House and though there is still more room to even inch where we were in the ‘90s, the economy has vastly improved and the national debt/deficit has been halted and reversed dropping each quarter.


Vision for a moment if you will, if Republicans had gained all control in the 2008 elections vying up with all their agendas to cut public services for the hurting public and allow the auto industry to go bankrupt. Yeah…chew from that tub of lard for a bit.

Purists are not good in making legislation; pragmatists are. Obama is a pragmatist and to bring up Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas again; he is a purist. Let’s look to compare.

Brownback incorporated Republican ideology into his state laws slashing wealthy/corporate taxes creating a state budget shortfall of $710 million. Since being reelected, he’s going to plug the hemorrhaging gap with gizmos by diverting millions from state highway funds and retirement systems. Kansans voted for that.

Fragile egos seek superiority through deceit, fear, mythical beliefs and prayer while having absolutely nothing to do with substance or meaningful evidence. The main energy force driving the right-wing engine is rooted in apocalyptic expressionisms. The Ebola scare, the Central American children refugee deceits, prophesizing Obamacare as death panels are all fronts of GOP deceit directed towards its gullible and not too bright base. The GOP’s bait is geared towards a fearful, ignorant, bigoted and rhetorical belief base.

Even falsely blaming Obama for the ISIL uprising when it was solely due to W. Bush/Cheney policies that created the porous borders and authoritative vacuum in Iraq is inept politics.

Who is the Republican Party? Some will argue backed by substance that Republican elements correlate nicely with big business versus the poor; that it dovetails radically with KKK and Aryan Nation ideology; that it is an extension of Ayn Rand philosophical policies and that it thrives on division of the nation whether it be race, gender or socio-economic standing.

As of late in my opinion, the Republican Party is merely an obstacle of opposition and most certainly not a legislative body. They require a nemesis and although there are those that say they will simply pick another to replace him, I say once Obama is out of office the GOP will flail with no motivational force to entice their base with.

What have Republicans achieved as constructive for the nation since Obama and W. Bush have been in office? If nothing comes to mind it doesn’t mean that you’re absent minded, there just simply is nothing to report.

Oh, the Republican House crammed a bunch of last minute two year unfinished business down the throat of legislation in one day just before their Thanksgiving break while Boehner strutted his feathers in saying, “We will not stand idle as the president undermines the rule of law in our country and places lives at risk...we’ll work to protect the Constitution of the United States.” With that said, then Republicans adjourned running off to their extended Thanksgiving time off.

Maybe if we gave congress every other week off, they’d get something done in Boehner’s House of Republican cards, for it appears when it is time to go on vacation, only then do they act on legislation.

With that said…I am signing off and high tailing it too…


In Last Minute Reporting,
BJA
01/01-18/2015 

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