Tag Archives: GOP

Weeks away.

Just a few hurried comments on the events of the day. (The events of the day are keeping me from the events of the day. Shall I say that a second time?)

Cain Mutiny. Presidential candidate Herman Cain has some more difficulties maintaining his myth of marital bliss, and this may be a game stopper for him. Naturally the death knell may come about over something that doesn’t matter a damn. Aside from his family, who the hell cares who he sleeps with, so long as it’s consensual and doesn’t involve minors, animals, etc.? Somehow this seems to bother people (and the mass media) more than the fact that the man has given zero thought to anything having to do with public affairs. He must be the first presidential candidate I’ve ever seen fail to give an opinion when someone asks him about something like the Libya intervention. He had to ask the interviewer what side Obama (i.e. the United States) was on. What the … ? Has the man been living in a pizza box? He is running for the G.O.P. nomination and apparently has no concept of what the pro-life and pro-choice positions actually mean.

Why the hell does this man want to be president? He smells to me like a cut-out for the Koch brothers, but what he says is that God encouraged him to run. Personally, I think God may have just been trying to order a pizza.

Deficit of Imagination. They’re sparring over the payroll tax cut – otherwise known as The Only Tax Cut That Needs To Be Paid For. With the Occupy movement receiving eviction notices from coast to coast, Congress is managing to turn the conversation back to debt with a good bit of help from the major news organizations. I heard Joe Scarborough sparring with Sherrod Brown about Medicare costs and showing “courage” by acknowledging that those costs were tantamount to a cancer on the body politic. His solution? Cut, cut, cut. Which is basically shift the burden onto the elderly, the ill, etc.

I didn’t hear Brown say this (he may have), but the courageous position to my mind would be to advocate expanding Medicare to cover everybody. The reason we have deficit Medicare spending projected for the next few decades is simple – we are subsidizing the profitability of private health insurers, who get to cover the least costly consumers while the government covers the most costly ones (i.e. the ones private insurers don’t want). The courageous thing to do would be to say, we can’t afford this model any longer.

I’m waiting to hear that from someone. Anyone?

luv u,

jp

Eight is enough.

Though I didn’t intend to do so, I did in fact watch part of the Republican debate at the Reagan Library on Wednesday night. At the outset, I have to say that this election season is front-loaded beyond all comprehension. For chrissake – no one has actually voted in any real sense, and yet we’ve already seen a major candidate – T-Paw – drop out, seen others alternately being accorded front-runner status, seen the declaration of a “two-man race” for the G.O.P. nomination, etc. What the hell… it’s bad enough that we are now in perpetual election mode (i.e. all of last year and much of 2009 was taken up with the mid-terms; all of this year with 2012). Can we just let the voters sort this out?

Having said that, on to the debate. The moderator’s attention first trained on THE NEXT NEW THING: RICK PERRY, who is, in fact, a very old thing. Perry (no relation) has gotten a lot of pop-culture credit for job creation. Every time I hear this, I think of an Onion headline from back when a previous Texan was in the White House – the headline went something like “Bush to U.S. Businesses: Create Millions of Shitty Jobs.”  I think it’s kind of a Texas thing, because many of those great Texas jobs that are not either in government or in the extractive industries are of the low-wage, no benefits, no security type. Anyway, here is what the governor had to say:

You want to create jobs in America? You free the American entrepreneur to do what he or she does, which is risk their capital, and I’ll guarantee you, the entrepreneur in America, the small businessman and woman, they’re looking for a president that will say we’re going to lower the tax burden on you and we’re going to lower the regulation impact on you, and free them to do what they do best: create jobs.

This is the kind of trope you hear from all of the G.O.P. these days. It’s those job-killing (low to non-existent) taxes and those job-killing (incredibly lax) regulations that are killing those jobs! Hokum. I have to think these people are just garden-variety liars, because they all look old enough to remember some substantial portion of recent history. If they think for five minutes, they’ll realize that the reason we have high-tech industry and something we call the internet is because public investments were made over the course of decades, mostly through the Pentagon system. I don’t know why these people can’t simply admit that the Federal government, with its enormous buying power, can play a significant role in prompting the development of new technologies and new industries, and has a history of allowing the privatization of innovations that the government paid to procure.

It’s not rocket science. Wait… actually, it is. That was funded by the government, too. More on these clowns later.

luv u,

jp