Day: February 6, 2009

Here Is A Thought

If Pres. Obama had settled into the White House and asked for a list from the governors to decide on the direction of the stimulus bill, what would have been the reaction of the Repubs?

Probably they would have jumped on Obama for dragging his feet while the economy was tanking rapidly.  He would not have been acting decisive enough for them.  All this crap daily is just that….so much crap.  They are talking points that the GOP sends out to divide and try to conquer and rule the daily news cycle.

If McCain had won there is no doubt the Dems would be playing the same game of partisanship.  As I have said from the beginning of the 2008 cycle, NO CHANGE is coming…it will always be politics as usual.

When the people understand this, the sooner we get rid of the trash in Washingtoin and start anew…….the tired old mantras from the GOP and the lame  economic crap of the Dems was way too predictable.  It is a game being played with the people’s lives.  Is not time for the people to go back in control?

If none of this worries you, then roll over go back to sleep, play with the old lady or just whack off….and keep your mouth shut when your life and country goes down the toilet for the last time.

Peace!  Out!

Try And Try Again…..

Time to mail a bitch to your senators….the time for this partisan BS is OVER!  Time to get the economy repaired and moving in the right direction.  I love the Repubs when on mic say they want the presz to succeed and then go about trying to make him fail……hypocrisy is staring to smell like so much fecal matter.

The stumbling block Thursday was the 10-year price of the stimulus plan being debated in the Senate — more than $900 billion — fueling Republican demands that it be scaled back.

“The time for talk is over,” President Barack Obama said Thursday, noting a report that unemployment claims jumped to 626,000 last week, a 26-year high and up 78% from a year ago. National employment numbers are due out today and are expected to indicate a national economy still slipping toward depression.

Much is riding on the legislation, particularly for Michigan, which had the highest jobless rate in the nation in December, 10.6%. The stimulus bill contains billions of dollars to extend unemployment benefits, offer Medicaid coverage and other insurance to people who are out of work and create jobs through infrastructure investment.

A Congressional Budget Office estimate said the stimulus could increase employment by 1.3 million to 3.9 million jobs nationwide by the end of next year.

The cost of the Senate version under debate Thursday night topped the $819-billion House version passed last week on a 244-188 vote. One big difference in the Senate version was a $70-billion fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax. Without the fix — which Congress has made each year in recent years — millions of middle-class taxpayers would be forced to pay higher taxes.

The big-ticket items were expected to remain part of the overall package. They included $247 billion in tax cuts, much of that committed to a provision that would give $500 back to individuals who make less than $75,000 a year and $1,000 to couples who make less than $150,000.

As proposed, the bill also committed $16 billion to build and repair schools, $27 billion for road and bridge work and $8.4 billion for improvements to public transportation. There also was $79 billion to help states cope with the stress on their budgets, which Levin called a key component.

Republicans decried the overall cost, arguing that it was far too much, but efforts to scale it back via floor amendments failed. Meanwhile, off the floor, negotiators tried to find a way to trim it — a prospect Obama endorsed, as long as it got the bill moving.

Please do not misunderstand me…Dems are just as partisan as the Repubs and all this political BS is killing the country……somewhere, someone has got to have the ‘nads to stop this silly “business as usual” crap and get on with moving the country forward.  The trickle down stuff will NOT work!  Direct spending into the economy is the only way in the short term.

Time to make these people, and I use the term very loosely, to do their job and stop playing the ideological crap.  The country cannot afford this.  Maybe we should stop payment on their damn checks to get their ateention….and then maybe they will feel the pain of the American people.

2009 Anal-Ocity

My fingers are getting tired from all the anal statements flying around the net.

This one is from FOX news commentator, Glenn Beck, when talking about the Obama stimulus plan.

“Bad Asset Repository Fund — BARF.” Beck stated: “When you got a group of people that can’t figure out the acronym bill would be BARF, I think maybe we should change the name. Don’t you think that, really, we should stop listening to these people?”

But the January 29 Forbes.com article that referenced the acronym BARF did not attribute it to the Obama administration,  titled “Here Comes the BARF” — reporter Liz Moyer specifically noted that “[t]hey haven’t named it yet” before going on to write that it “would be truth in advertising” to call “a federal ‘bad bank’ to soak up toxic assets the Bad Asset Repository Fund.”

In case there is someone somewhere that has not got the memo…the Obama team is calling his stim package the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act–sorry people but BARF was a made up acronym.

How is that for having your finger on the pulse of Washington…he did not realize that it was a made up title…..yikes!

Remember:  10 or so anal-ocities will be picked at the end of the year and my readers will be asked to vote on the winner of the “Assie” award and if anyone has an anal-ocity they think that would be good please send it to me and we will post it and give credit where credit is due.

Bring Back The Fear

This from an interview Cheney gave to the Politico.

Just when you thought it was safe to listen to the news…….BAM!

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

What a damn tap dance!  And that is hard to do from a wheelchair.  But Dick is an accomplished political tap dancer.

Why Not A Package?

This is from an article written by Andie Coller in Politico.

What a difference a word makes.,,,,,,,,,

The problem with the word “stimulus” is that the bill, as the president conceived it, was never meant to be purely a fiscal jolt, but rather a far broader economic plan that included everything from investments in alternative energy to supports for those likely to be hit hardest by the economic downturn.

Team Obama certainly recognized the import of the language to describe the legislation. They used focus groups to determine which words to employ and carefully crafted the bill’s title: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
What they didn’t count on was that pretty much no one would call it that.

Without a snappy nickname (even the non sequitur TARP, with its unfortunate connotations of shrouds and opacity, has come into more common usage) or an obvious headline phrase (“recovery” can’t stand on its own without “package,” “bill” or “act,” and therefore takes up too much real estate on the page), the media and just about everyone else have continued to cling to the word “stimulus.”

“‘Stimulus’ was the term everyone was using in the beginning … and once the media starts using a term, it is very hard to change,” explained Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake.

Even fellow Democrats have had a hard time getting with the program. Earlier this week, Politico reported that an Appropriations Committee staffer lectured House Dems about their loose language with respect to the bill — and then held up a chart with the word “stimulus” to describe the legislation.
The battle is more than a rhetorical one, as the differences in language reflect real differences in philosophy: One approach treats the economy as if it is in coronary arrest and simply needs to be shocked back into rhythm. The other assumes that the economy is fundamentally unwell in some respects and that even once it has been “stimulated,” it will require a double bypass and years of rehabilitation in order to recover and thrive.

“‘Stimulus’ implies immediacy, implies fast acting, implies a program that is meant to prop up and inspire the private sector, which really does fit in with what the Republicans are trying to do,” says Feehery.
The prevalence of the word — coupled with the Obama administration’s desire to make the legislation a bipartisan effort — has put the Democrats on defense, forced to explain how one provision or another fits under the “stimulus” umbrella.

“Stimulus equals short-term job creation, so it’s easy to hold up any longer-term investment and shoot it down if it’s not obvious how it creates jobs in the short term. And that allows the Republicans to shoot down a lot of perhaps worthwhile investments,” says Doug Hattaway, president of Hattaway Communications.

Indeed, during the debates in the House, the word “stimulus” became a kind of litmus test among Republicans, who held various provisions up for scrutiny against that standard and dismissed as “bloat” or “pork” anything that didn’t conform.

So basically, what the entire debate in Washington is over the use of the word “stimulus”.  Obama and the boyz have got to be smarter than that….do not leave yourself open from the attacks from the right…they should have learned this during the campaign.

Are Repubs Scared Of Obama?

At least according to Louisiana’s David Vitter.

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) said Tuesday that his fellow Republican Senate colleagues are “scared to death” by President Barack Obama’s popularity.

“What’s been going on in a lot of these votes is that some folks are just scared to death quite frankly of the new president and his polling numbers and sort of holding under the table,” Vitter told radio host Laura Ingraham. An audio clip of the remark was later posted on the conservative blog Hot Air.

Vitter insisted that that “half” of the Senate Republicans are intimidated by Obama’s high approval rating, which according to the latest Gallup poll stands at 64 percent.

As evidence, he pointed at the 19 Republicans who voted to confirm Eric Holder as Attorney General. “Just look at that short list and that gives you the general sense of who I’m talking about,” he said.

The Louisiana Republican has voted against each of Obama’s appointments that was not confirmed by a voice vote.

Does that name sound familiar?  Uh huh, that’s right…he was caught with his pants down in the DC Madame scandal.  But he and his Repub collegues are playing a politically dangerous game….they are betting that the stim package will fail and give them a leg up in the next election….partisanship may be the 8oo lb gorilla in the room come next election cycle.

Office Of Faith-Based Policies

As reported by the Associated Press.

President Barack Obama will ask for a legal review of the White House faith-based office before deciding whether to allow federally funded religious groups to hire only their own.

Obama planned to sign an executive order on Thursday forming the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the White House said.

But the order also directs White House staff and lawyers and the Justice Department to develop a policy that would guide how government-supported programs can hire staff, according to a religious leader with knowledge of the plans. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the details have not been released.

The deliberate approach is unlikely to please either conservative religious leaders, who worry they’ll need to compromise their religious beliefs to participate, or liberal religious and secular leaders, who quickly want to undo Bush administration hiring policies.

The president will also appoint Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister who headed religious outreach for Obama’s Senate office and later his campaign, to lead the partnerships office and name 25 religious and secular leaders to a new advisory board.

During his presidential campaign, Obama said he wanted to expand White House faith-based efforts begun under Bush. But while he endorsed Bush’s initiative to give religious groups more access to federal funding, he also promised to make some changes to the office.

Obama’s advisers want to be certain tax dollars sent to the faith-based social service groups are used for secular purposes, such as feeding the hungry or housing the homeless, and not for religious evangelism. The administration doesn’t want to be perceived as managing the groups yet does want transparency and accountability.

Obama pledged during the campaign to allow taxpayer-funded religious institutions to hire and fire based on religion — but only for the activities run on private funding.

One question is whether the faith-based office will issue grants under the Bush rules while the hiring policy is worked out.

Now That Is What I Am Talking About!

This post may be of little interest to some….but since I exist on caffeine and nicotine…it is one for me…..

Folgers, Maxwell House, and Starbucks are America’s best-selling ground coffees. But all three were iced by Eight O’Clock Colombian coffee in our taste tests. As for Starbucks, it didn’t even place among the top regular coffees and trailed among decafs.

Our tests of 19 coffees also show that some of the best cost the least. At about $6 per pound, Eight O’Clock costs less than half the price of Gloria Jean’s, Peet’s, and other more expensive brands.

Like your joe without all the caffeine? Dunkin’ Donuts and Millstone were the front runners among the decafs. But Folgers Gourmet Selection Lively Colombian came in close behind and costs up to $3 less per pound. But even the best decaffeinated coffees couldn’t match the best regular brews in our taste tests.

Our coffee experts focused on 100 percent Colombian — a best-selling bean — for regular coffee. Most of our decaffeinated coffees are a blend of different beans.

What makes a great cup of Colombian? Lots of aroma and flavor, some floral notes and fruitiness, a touch of bitterness, and enough body to provide a feeling of fullness in the mouth. Woody, papery, or burnt tastes are off-notes.

Weeks of sipping and swirling confirmed that even 100 percent Colombian coffee and its Juan Valdez logo don’t guarantee quality.

Colombian is good but I prefer Ethiopian……..