Bits & Pieces $12

For comedians across the country, Sara Palin is the gift that just keeps giving.

Her recent tour of places where other candidates were announcing their candidacy led her to New Hampshire where she was kind enough to tell the world that Paul Revere’s famous ride was made to warn the British that we weren’t going to let them take our guns away. Really? We know she can’t read, the least she could do is watch a few old movies before she opens her mouth.

She is now publishing a book about her term (?) as governor of Alaska and it’s entitled Undefeated. Can you believe it? Undefeated. How about, Unfnished?

You gotta hand it to her, she has hutspa. This is a woman who was mayor of a town so insignificant that the most serious problem she had to face was deciding who caught the biggest fish in any given month. Somehow she got elected governor of the state and that’s when she realized she was in so far over her head she was about to drown. She would actually have to read stuff to find out what the problems were. So she quit. The one significant job she ever had, she quit. And now people are talking about running her for president. What has happened to this country? What’s in the water? Oh, yeah, I almost forgot… the book. Maybe it would be better to call it Quitter.

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So Chris Christie that tower of fiscal responsibility takes a State helicopter at two grand an hour to watch his kid play little league Why the rush? He had nothing on his agenda that day anyway. No wait! He did have a meeting; but oh dear, it was with a bunch of Iowa moneymen who had come to convince the wide load that he is perfect presidential fodder.

So not only does he stiff New Jersey for about five grand on the chopper but he has the car that could have driven him to the game waiting on the field to drive him the hundred yards from the chopper to the diamond. All I could think watching that huge butt climb into the chopper was; better he should have walked. He really needs the exercise

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It’s hard to figure out how Republican Senator Rand Paul could be more of a lame idiot than he has already made himself out to be but this week he topped it off by writing an article in Guns &Patriots, a seriously fascist gun lobby blog in which he attacks Hilary Clinton and the UN  for trying to implement an international gun law aimed at cutting down the availability of guns for terrorists, drug dealers and international crime syndicates.

Rand seems to think this is a bad thing.  You’re right Rand, let’s just help all these degenerate scum get all the guns they can buy and maybe some day we’ll all get lucky and one of them will pop your cork.

Now before you all get bent out of shape, I don’t really want Rand to get shot but I do believe in reaping what you sew and the kind of  idiotic drivel that he spouts in this article, the blind opposition to any kind of gun control anywhere in the world, is both dangerous and mindless and I think he has to take some kind of responsibility for the gutless crap he spreads on the voter driven waters of the  gun lobby.

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The Stink About Israel:

I loved Ed Koch. I fought him tooth and nail when he was the congressman for the Village but I always respected his views and understood that they were ultimately aimed at the perceived needs of his constituents. There comes a time, however, when even the greats have to hang up their cleats and sit in the sun.

Koch’s attack on Obama for his position on the Israel/Palestine peace process indicates that the old warrior is simply missing the point. Hard as it seems, he just doesn’t understand that Obama’s position and Netanyahu’s position are the same and all the pro-Israel pundits who are currently losing their minds over their mistaken idea that Obama is ready to abandon Israel are just unable to understand what is going on in the politics of the debate.

Obama and Netanyahu are both saying the same thing but using different words. They actually agree that what should be done is that the two parties should start with the ’67 borders and then negotiate new borders from them. Netanyahu can’t say that in exactly those words because he is a minority leader, controlling only the far right 27% of the Knesset.

What is really upsetting about Koch’s position is that he has declared that he won’t vote for Obama if he continues along this path. I’m shocked, Ed. Are you putting the needs of Israel ahead of the needs of the United States? That’s not very patriotic, especially coming from an old pol. Maybe it’s just time to stand down. If you really don’t understand that The United States is probably the only friend Israel has had since its founding and that we have endured a long list of problems from that friendship, then maybe you just aren’t as smart as I thought you were.

And while you’re standing down, Ed, maybe you should also tell all those friends of yours who aren’t intelligent enough to understand what is actually going on to just sit down and shut the hell up. They’re just getting in the way of a settlement.

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The banks are running the biggest scam in financial history with respect to their compensation plans. Bank and Wall Street executives are receiving a windfall of huge bonuses while over twenty percent of the country is out of work. Executives roll out new yachts while children go hungry and families live without heat or potable water. What’s their excuse? They claim that if they aren’t competitive they will lose all their executive talent. To whom? If all the banks are under the same constraints where is the talent going to go, Somalia, Nigeria?

Europe and the Middle East have their own talent glut. They’re not going to be hiring the screw-ups who crashed our economy. They have their own screw-ups.

No doubt the country would be a lot better off if the banks had used the money they are now using to overpay their executives to give out small business loans so that new businesses could hire more people but nobody really expects the banks to have any sense of social responsibility, certainly not considering the way they have acted up until now.

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I have always considered the brilliant Fareed Zakaria the most intelligent person in the media. It was therefore with an exaggerated sense of smug satisfaction that I watched his show on 6/6/11 on which he laid out the only plausible program for this country to emerge quickly from its current doldrums.

What was Mr. Zakaria’s plan? Raise taxes, mostly by fixing the tax code and build infrastructure, and why does he want to build infrastructure? Because it accomplishes two things at once. It creates employment in an area in which it is currently desperately needed and at the same time it creates the building blocks on which the rest of the economy stands.

I have been extolling these same steps now for over a year. It is the only logical choice, but to create infrastructure you need money and the Right has been busy for almost two years trying to find ways to choke off any significant supply of money with their idiotic trickle down policies. It is so contrary to any kind of logical approach, so destructive, that one could almost see them as some kind of foreign agents trying to take down the country.

Now I know that, that’s not the case but their twisted policies are just as destructive as if they were foreign agents. They are certainly not patriots.

I see the likes of Mitt Romney saying that Obama is a complete failure and all I can think is that if he is, it is certainly the fault of the likes of Romney who is more concerned with making the President seem like a failure than he is with saving the country. If that’s patriotism then Newt Gingrich isn’t a horses’ ass.

We have the means available to save the country, a new super Stimulus and anyone who says the other one didn’t work is lying, just look a the record. This time we need it fully funded and applied to infrastructure. You can’t pay taxes and reduce the deficit if you’re out of work.

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The Jersey wide load, Chris Christie is betraying his state in more ways then free helicopter rides. After running for governor as New Jersey’s No.1 clean-energy advocate he has proceeded to cut $158M from the clean energy fund. In doing so he has abandoned not only his own constituents but also the ten surrounding states who were part of the Northeast Initiative. He has also withdrawn the state from a lawsuit against utilities to reduce emissions.

The Northeast Initiative has been remarkably successful according to other governors involved. Since 2008 it has created more than $700M for programs requiring utilities to either lower their emissions or buy allowances to pollute.

Christie says the program isn’t working but the nine other governors involved, including Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley say he’s a liar.  The program has supplied $100M to the state from its successful operations. Christie doesn’t seem to remember this, maybe because he has stolen $65M of it to help pay down the state’s debt.

After 70 years of being that dirty little state with all the smells and the oil refineries Jersey finally has a chance to clean up its image but along comes a loud mouth Republican with only a 4% approval rating from his own constituents, to trash any chance of the Garden State has of cleaning up its act.

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