Better than Danforth Quayle...

Sarah Palin: Obama 'Inexperienced' In Private Sector & Government  03/ 5/11
    During an appearance on "America's Nightly Scoreboard" on Fox Business on Friday night, she said, "See because our president is so inexperienced in the private sector and in government and in actually running anything and making any kind of budget that inexperience has really made manifest in some of the statements he makes."
    Palin went on to take issue with the president's handling of the economy and said he should be "engaging in free-market principles that work" such as reducing taxes. The Fox News contributor added, "His naive and destructive and terrifying anti-oil agenda is going to bring our nation to our knees and his agenda must be stopped."

     Sarah is becoming a much better target than former Vice President Dan Quayle, seeing as she appears to be barely literate or is just a poor extemporaneous speaker. Her main point, Obama's inexperience, is not supported by anything resembling proof or reasoning. Instead, her main point is stated first so that the listener's attention is garnered and she just reiterates her point that he is inexperienced because his inexperience is obvious because of the statements he makes. What exactly these statements are, and how they prove his inexperience, are never specifically quoted.
    Her second point, that Obama is not adhering to "free market principles" such as reducing taxes, ignores the fact that such tax cuts put in place by the prior Republican administration have been extended by Obama. It is also the opinion of many economists that these tax cuts have played a large role in the present fiscal crisis. In addition, Herbert Hoover believed in free market principles and acted in support of the idea that the free market, left to it's own devices, would correct itself. He was wrong.

   Her last point, Obama's "naive and destructive and terrifying anti-oil agenda" being harmful to America, is unsubstantiated. The term "anti-oil agenda" is vague, meaningless and acts as window dressing to her idea that Obama is going to bring America to it's knees with his agenda. Again, an unsupported allegation that states he is harming America because it is her opinion that America is being harmed by him.



Other Republican hopefuls...

   "During the past few weeks, the play of American politics has been particularly disturbing. Consider the willful ignorance of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, trying to convince his supporters that President Obama is "not one of us." To that end, he suggested that President Obama's worldview was shaped by his childhood in Kenya -- or maybe it was, Indonesia -- and by radical movements like the Kenyan Mau-Mau revolt. Huckabee, a potential Republican candidate for president, went on to say that President Obama's father and grandfather molded his "foreign" ideas about how the world works. It doesn't matter that President Obama hardly knew his father or his paternal grandfather, or that the Mau-Mau rebellion took place far from the Obama homestead in Kenya, a country President Obama first visited when he was 26 years old. Governor Huckabee also failed to mention the "inconvenient truths" that President Obama was raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents who grew up in Kansas or that President Obama's maternal grandfather fought with Patton in Europe during World War II."
Paul Stoller-Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University;
Author, The Power of the BetweenPosted: March 5, 2011 05:40 PM

   The willful and slanderous misinterpretation of facts, whether it be about Obama's heritage or public employees being the cause of our current financial woes, seem to be a hallmark of the Republican party as it currently does business. I do not know if either Democrats or Republicans have a monopoly on truth or sleazeball tactics, but it seems to me that the most blatant of all lies are being perpetrated by the Republican candidates who are jockeying for position in the primaries.

 

Newt 2, the movie...

Huffington Post February 27, 2011
    Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Friday that President Obama had overstepped his constitutional authority with his recent decision to order his administration to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act. While the move didn't immediately open Obama up to impeachment, Gingrich claimed, it did raise his worry about a future constitutional crisis.
In an interview with Newsmax, Gingrich characterized the president's latest announcement regarding DOMA, a law that allows states to not honor gay marriages, as "a dereliction of duty and a violation of his constitutional oath" that "cannot be allowed to stand."
     On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said Obama had determined that his administration would no longer defend a law defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, but that it would continue to be enforced pending an actual legislative overturn.
Gingrich on Friday said that this plan of action was unacceptable.
    "He swore an oath on the Bible to become president that he would uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws of the United States," Gingrich said. "He is not a one-person Supreme Court. The idea that we now have the rule of Obama instead of the rule of law should frighten everybody."

I would like to draw the readers attention to the ridiculous position that the Newt has taken. Obama did indeed take an oath to uphold the Constitution and enforce laws. The second paragraph states that this law banning same-sex marriage would continue to be enforced. What the Obama administration will not do is pay lip service to the notion that this sort of law is defensable, and seems to be counting on either the legislature or the courts to issue further instructions on either the mechanism of enforcement or the constitutionality of such a law. Since the executive branch is not the legislative branch, the current administration is continuing to enforce the law. Since the executive branch is not the judicial, the current administration is continuing to enforce the law.

That Mr. Gingrich cannot understand this renders him unfit for office in this country, and proves that what he is engaged in is simply rabble-rousing nonsense designed to appeal to those who have forgotten that Newt Gingrich was convicted by Congress for criminal malfeasance regarding money and lying about it to the ethics committee, composed of his peers in Congress.

Gingrich, from 1997...

House Reprimands, Penalizes Speaker
By John E. Yang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 22 1997; Page A01

The House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and order him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House's 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing.


The ethics case and its resolution leave Gingrich with little leeway for future personal controversies, House Republicans said. Exactly one month before yesterday's vote, Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.
"Newt has done some things that have embarrassed House Republicans and embarrassed the House," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.). "If [the voters] see more of that, they will question our judgment."

I read this morning that the Newt is forming a committee to explore the possibility of running for president. His political ambitions are shrewdly timed, as he no doubt feels America is open to his brand of Conservatism, and his former political career's ignominious end has no doubt been forgotten by his erstwhile political base of salt-of-the-earth, mainstream Conservatives. Let us hope their morals extend past the last decade when the Newt perpetrated and admitted an egregious failing of not only financial irresponsibility but also lying to his peers in Congress about it.

ADDENDUM dated May 15, 2011
Now Newt has announced he is running for President, and those who feel that he would make a good president ignore the fact that his 1997 crime would be an enhanced felony had he not been granted "immunity" due to his Representative status...

Is this what Marx meant by the classless society?

Rush Limbaugh recently blasted first lady Michelle Obama about her size and body image. Apparently, according to Limbaugh, Michelle Obama is eating way too much and not looking thin enough. He said: "It doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutrition, dietary advice. I'm trying to say that our first lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue."  Debbie Hines, Legal/Political Commentator, Lawyer February 24, 2011 07:51 PM

Let's get a little background to this diatribe of the man you love to hate:

Rush Limbaugh Turns Himself In On Fraud Charge In Rx Drug Probe

By Peter Whoriskey

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 29, 2006

MIAMI, April 28 -- Talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh surrendered to authorities Friday on a charge of committing fraud to obtain prescription drugs, concluding an investigation that for more than two years has hovered over the law-and-order conservative.

Rush is overweight and out of shape.  It is his insecurity and his own lack of self-control that more than likely drives him to attack  a healthy lifestyle. Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not a health and fitness expert.

http://fatthenfitnow.wordpress.com 01/30/11  Could Rush Limbaugh be contributing to childhood Obesity?

Here is what Rush has to say about an American fitness icon:

"Healthy" Eating and Other Myths January 24, 2011

With great fanfare, it was reported last week that the current health advice about eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day is outdated, and that scientists now believe that eight portions is more beneficial." And with no more than that, people will believe it because it shows up in the media.  And scientists wouldn't lie about this, why would they anyway?  Jack LaLanne was a vegetarian, look what happened to him?  He died. 

With this kind of scintillating logic, it would be useless to bathe because one will just get dirty again quickly enough...

Conservative or Preservative? Corporate influence is pervasive...

    The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
   By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.—Robert Reich,  The Republican Strategy

    Mr. Reich makes a strong case for opposing the current Republican outcry against the Obama administration, and does so in a way that puts so-called Conservatives into the role of preservers of a lop-sided status quo which profits only a few at the expense of the American Dream. My idea of this American Dream consists of working hard for your retirement as well as being honest about paying for the services we do indeed receive from state and federal government, which means admitting that Americans pay less in taxes than most of the world and receive more. In addition, expecting those who are elected to serve the interests of those who elect them is bedrock to any notion of representative democracy.
   This last notion takes on a new meaning when combined with Supreme Court rulings that erode individual liberty at the expense of granting corporations more rights than any one individual. The same laws allow corporate abnegation of responsibility not permitted to any one individual. The same laws give corporations the ability to donate more to any political campaign than can any one individual, unless that person is Bill Gates or some other billionaire. The Supreme Court has done this by taking a few 19th Century notions about corporate rights that are not healthy for our way of life currently, and allow corporate influence into all areas of our lives.
    President Eisenhower, one of the nations greatest military minds, stated in his 1961 farewell address as President about such corporate influence:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

He ends by stating,
   "Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

Poker and the Art of Folding, a short monograph...

Poker is a game
of mostly folding, few bets.
All in when you do.

Edmund Burke speaks of tolerance & the limits of forbearance...

I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.

Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters (1773)

   I have noticed that many people are experts when it comes to someone else's behavior or life. I think it important to learn to treat such opinions with a spirit of tolerance, but have trouble knowing the point at which it becomes necessary to engage in refuting opinions that are intolerant of opposing points of view. Indeed, how far one should go in exposing and refuting intolerance without oneself being laid open to the charge of intolerance is quite a puzzle.

   While I subscribe to the view that "an eye for an eye leaves the world blind," I cannot subscribe to the view that forever turning the other cheek is indeed a prudent strategy. Dealing with those who demonstrate their intolerance by forcing compliance through legal or bullying tactics, claiming the right to do so on religious or political beliefs, cannot and will not depend on passive strategies.
   I would like to point out that non-violence is not by definition passive, nor do good manners dictate smiling fatuously while rudeness is perpetrated. But as a person who strives for tolerance and good behavior, I feel I am left with few good replies when confronted with certain types of behavior, such as the picture below. It is all wrong on so many levels, yet...

There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)

Ten Years After...



Again, trotting out some old material that is still relevant today. As a friend of mine posted recently, it's too bad that all my friends feel the same way—meaning that I am still preaching to the choir. Still, I think it noteworthy that 10 years after the WTC destruction, we still have a presence in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

Prove the Mayans right—vote for Palin in 2012

Stay tuned for a series of mishaps that masquerade as interviews from a number of newscasters, and even Ralph Nader in a spoof ad—as George H. W. Bush said back in 1991, "Stay the course!"

   Some of these interviews go back a few years, but as Sarah Palin continues to gain adherents politically, I thought it prudent to trot them out again. Perhaps I am preaching to the choir, but in the last week we have seen many tributes to Ronald Reagan who ran up the largest national debt in history. As his proponents state, he rid the world of the "Soviet menace," but the price paid then was higher than the current national debt in terms of the buying power of the US dollar.
   Yet the last election saw many Republican candidates gain office, mostly on the campaign platform that Obama is not doing enough, fast enough. Odd, because these same Republicans have succeeded in putting up so many roadblocks that action is nigh impossible, yet the same Americans who voted these Republicans into office may indeed support Sarah Palin and continue to sing the praises of the Great Communicator.

"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." http://www.msu.edu/~owensma1/rrbomb.wav

Spin Dry...

People often ask, "What's it like being a drug & alcohol counselor?"

Somebody's Lying about Oil Profits...

In Santa Rosa's Press Democrat (4/29/06 pA8) is an article written by J. Loven under an Associated Press byline, entitled "Bush opposes tax on oil profits." Loven writes, "President Bush said Friday that taxing enormous oil industry profits is not the way to calm Americans' anxieties about pain at the gas pump, and that his 'inclinations and instincts' are that major oil companies are not intentionally overcharging drivers."

Now this is a bit hard to swallow seeing as oil profits have risen dramatically--one figure touts a 75% increase in the last year or so. This is a figure that runs into the billions of dollars, and it is not showing signs of tapering off. Terence O'Hara, writing for theWashington Post (8/28/05; P D01), says, "By most familiar comparisons, the $9.92 billion profit earned by Exxon Mobil Corp. in just three months is almost unimaginable. "

So, where does this $9.2 billion come from? I decided to check out the websites of these companies, and ran across the ConocoPhillips.com site: www.conocophillips.com/newsroom/other_resources/energyanswers/oil_profits.htmOn this site is an explanation of where your gas money goes, along with a cute graphic that is produced by the US Dept. of Energy. It is misleading, and I will show you why.

Let's use the figures on the graphic, and let us also assume a $3.10 price for gasoline at the pump. Of this $3.10 cost, the 58% crude oil cost=$1.80. The 20% federal, state, and local taxes=$0.62. The 8% marketing and distribution cost=$0.25. The 15% refining cost=$0.46. The grand total of these percentages=$3.13. Right away, I thought something was wrong. The oil companies do not sell at a $0.03/gallon loss, not if they hope to post record profits. Reading the graphic a bit more carefully, I see that those percentages total 101%, due to rounding off the figures. This accounts for the 3 cent difference, but is the least of the problems with this graphic.

Looking again at the ConocoPhillips website, I read that they make a profit of $0.09 a gallon. It is not surprising that this figure is nowhere included in the graphic. If I use their statistics, a base price of $3.10/gallon at the pump, I come up with a figure that shows a loss of 3 cents a gallon, yet the company is able to pull 9 cents a gallon profit from every transaction. From which category listed in the graphic does this money come from? The US Department of Energy has deliberately obscured the graph in two ways. Checking the figures, I discovered another serious error in math.

At 9 cents a gallon, it would take the sale of over 9 billion gallons of gas to equal $1 billion in profit, and the figures show profits larger by an order of magnitude. A profit of $9.2 billion, posted by Exxon/Mobile at approximately the same percentage of profit, would require the sale of 100 billion gallons of gas, oil, and other petroleum products in a three-month period. This is, of course, impossible. At the turn of the 20th century, the world only had 3-4 trillion gallons of oil anywhere. It has taken us 100+ years to go through the first trillion. This tells me someone is lying about the source of the oil profits, and US Department of Energy is complicit.

Marijuana as medicine...

As a cancer survivor, I used marijuana in the course of my treatment. Mind you, this was back in the late 1980's, when the hysteria over marijuana was much worse than it is today. My doctors were concerned that I was smoking anything at all, and prescribed Marinol for me. But it didn't work well, and I found that by taking half the prescribed amount of Marinol, and smoking a little marijuana, I could keep the nausea at bay. By a little, I mean less than a gram a day--consider that one cigarette weighs about a gram.

In any case, it was instrumental to my recovery. I gained weight, and was able to drag myself to the chemotherapy treatments time after time. This was no small feat, and there is something almost pathological about voluntarily checking yourself in for a treatment that will result in such severe symptoms for a week or two afterwards. Then, one day I woke up feeling good, and I knew that it would be time for another cycle of treatment. It was demoralizing to say the least. But I am alive today to tell the tale, and my tale today is the negative press reports about medical marijuana, evidenced in the headlines one reads in the newspaper daily.

My objection is simple--no distinction is made between marijuana that is produced for profit by those who choose to live outside the law, and marijuana that is produced for medical purposes. Both are referred to in the newspaper as Pot, and are designed to conjure up a public image that equates illegal use with compassionate, medical use. Typical headlines, often on the same page, will read Pot Club raided by Feds alongside Huge Pot Farm Busted--$1 million in plants seized. When I have queried our local newspaper about this issue, I have been told that "pot" is a lot shorter than "marijuana," so that is the reason why this is done. Hogwash.

When people are arrested for drunkeness or prescription-drug abuse, we do not read that they were arrested for "booze" (which is shorter than alcohol) or "downers" (which might be construed as pejorative). But it is considered perfectly fine to slam sick people, equating their marijuana use with garden-variety drug abuse. One reason for this is the fact that sick people are too busy trying to get well to take issue with small matters that are not life threatening. Another is the fact that medical users are politically marginalized. There are not enough of them to make a difference at the polls, and public perception of the problems they face are shaped by the newspapers, which in turn make no distinction between illegal use and legal, medical use. A vicious circle, that.

The stupidity of this position is further illustrated by looking at the statistics that highlight the harm done by various drugs, prescription and otherwise. Alcohol is involved in more auto accidents and violent crimes than all other substances taken together. In addition, prescription drug abuse accounts for more problems than all other drugs combined, save alcohol. But the leader in all health problems associated with drugs is tobacco, which is of course legal. The hysteria surrounding marijuana is cultural, and there are those who maintain that even compassionate use is a slippery slope. After all, what good can come from legalizing another harmful drug?

The fact of the matter is that marijuana use is prevalent, and our prisons are overcrowded with those arrested for the use or production of marijuana. Tobacco and alcohol may cause more problems, but tobacco and alcohol financed the American revolutionary war. Marijuana did not.

What are Conservatives conserving?

An editorial by New York Times columnist John Tierney, published 4/25/06 in Santa Rosa's Press Democrat is as ingenuous a piece of work as I have seen in quite a while. Entitled "Cheer up, Earth Day is over," it not only embodies what is wrong with this nation and its forgetful population, but also perpetuates serious error in its misguided point of view.

A quote from the third paragraph reads, "Most air pollutants have declined sharply in recent decades, and the amount of forest lands hasn't been shrinking at all--it's been fairly stable since 1920 and has actually grown in the last decade." As to the air pollution, I will not venture to say that it has increased, though I can scarcely say how that was accomplished.

However, to say that the amount of forest land in the U.S. has remained stable since 1920 is utter nonsense. In the early 80's I worked in the the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and I can offer photographic proof of this lie, as well as point out that in 1983 one hundred million board feet of timber was taken out of this national forest. In addition, since the 1970's the amount of replanting done to restore a huge amount of clear-cut areas has resulted in little more than a token effort. Not only is Tierney incorrect in his conclusions, but his wrongheaded attitude spreads a feel-good myth in the vain hope of countering the reasonable assumption that we simply do not practice conservation.

Lastly, his assertion that the U.S. "dropped out" from participating in the Kyoto Protocols was that it "couldn't get proper credit for the new growth in its forests," is a misleading and naive viewpoint. Don't forget our president's assertion that there is no global warming, his inability to reconcile reasonable environmental goals with the corporations that fund his administration, and the simple fact that less than 25% of all timber taken out of forests in the last 30 years has been replanted. Not much to credit, but it was a plausible (barely) excuse for the U.S. to pull out of a conference that it did not support.