Rick Perry claims that he is confident that the National Guard stands ready to do his bidding in any crisis that his backward state of Texas may encounter but it seems quite clear that he isn’t ready to stand behind the Guard. It appears that Perry wasn’t ready to pay these guys for leaving their jobs and defending our southern border against the salivating hoards of invading 10 year olds that Perry so fears.
That’s right fans; Perry stiffed the Guard. At least 50 members have applied for help at a local food bank because the $36 per day they were supposed to get to eat, never showed up. It appears that Rick, always ready to quick draw on something that will get him face time on the tube, isn’t quite so fast when it comes to coming across. Now he can add Dead Beat Gov to his list of accomplishments.
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Just when we thought the GOP had finally learned to take their collective feet out of their big mouths, along comes California congressman Ed Royce to inform the American people that ISIS was made up moistly of American and European terrorists. Way to go Ed, great to see that someone is still upholding the GOP’s policy of ignorance and stupidity. It warms ones heart. Is Ed from Orange County?
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A discussion on Kornacki’s show about Greg Orman the independent senate candidate from Kansas who is beating Pat Robertson right now in the polls. The whole discussion was about whether, if elected, he will cast his senate vote with the Democrats or the Republicans. Everyone had an opinion based on all kinds of political situations but amazingly enough no one even hinted that he might, regardless of party position, actually vote his conscience,. That fellow Americans is the state of the nation. We just can’t believe that anyone we elect to congress would really want to do the right thing. Have we become that cynical, or have we become that realistic?
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These guys who talk about the immediate threat from ISIS to the US may have a point, but when they talk about how easy it is for these British and American ISIS fighters to get back into the US and cause damage they prove that they have never been through customs.
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Dick Cheney, the war criminal that we still allow to live outside a cell has of course entered the Middle East discussion. He always has something to say, even about problems that he caused but doesn’t admit to. This senile fool declares that “we are at war and we must do everything it takes to win.” Really Dick? Maybe we wouldn’t be in this at all if you hadn’t screwed everything up by lying to start a war for oil and then putting a buffoon like Maliki in office to solve the peace. This is the moron that debathasized the Sunni army that we had trained and turned into a powerful fighting force. Then Maliki pulled all the officers and replaced them with sniveling cowards who just happened to be Shiites, and created a bunch of deserters, that allowed ISIS to walk all over them.
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The CBO,(Congressional Budget Office) has just released its projections for the next decade and interestingly enough they show that we are in a lot better position than we thought we were. They project the deficit, that number that all the Republicans have been screaming and wringing their hands about, to be $506 billion for 2015. That’s just 2.9% of GDP or a lot lower than it has been from 1974 through 2013. In 2009 after Bush had trashed the American economy the deficit was 9.2% of GDP.
Healthcare costs, which had been the target of all the Right-Wing crazies, have actually slowed dramatically thereby showing that the ACA was both sorely needed and a huge success. The CBO projects that the Government will spend $95 billion less on Medicare this year that it did in 2010. That $95 billion saving is more than the government will spend on welfare, unemployment insurance and Amtrack combined.
Now, all these things will get worse over the next few years because of the retirement of a huge percentage of the baby boomers but even that could be offset by only a 1.2% increase in tax revenue, which could easily be accomplished without a tax increase, just by tightening the laws and collecting everything that’s due. It could also come from tightening some of the money we give away as subsidies to industries that don’t really need it.
In any case the picture looks a lot better than the Republicans have projected and it’s a shame that the Democrats haven’t the brains or the energy to point that out to the voters. If the Democrats lose the senate, it wont be because of anything the Republicans have done. Anyone with even minimum intelligence knows that the Republicans are against everything that poor and middle class people need, but they have convinced those people, that pursuing their prejudices is more important than making a comfortable living.
The Republicans have traditionally run on anti-segregation, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti- contraception, anti-immigration, pro-war and pro guns platforms, all stuff that has almost nothing to do with their constituency but that their constituency gets all revved up about. That same constituency lives in sub-standard housing and makes money below the poverty line while the top 1% lives on their misery. If only they were bright enough to understand the way they are being conned, the world, including their small place in it would be much better off.
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Bobby Jindal from the failed state of Louisiana will never, like many of his GOP associates, learn to keep his mouth shut. But it’s when he starts talking about the debt and its solutions that we see Jindal for the pathetic clown he really is. He talks proudly about his state, where taxes never get raised, but why is this something to brag about? Louisiana is falling apart. What Katrina didn’t do to the state, the state is now doing to itself It is one of the poorest states in the nation with the worst schools, the worst infrastructure and an awful crime rate despite the fact that it is in a great location on the gulf, has one of the nation’s great tourist attractions in New Orleans, and sported a fantastic fishing industry before BP tried its best to destroy it. Now this clown goes around telling other governors how to run their states. Maybe he should just shut up and try fixing the stuff he was elected to fix.