Maxine, the devil is upset with you.....

...He says that sending all those tea- party people to hell will only ruin the joint.

The first time I met Maxine Waters in person she was flirting with my friend from law school while we visited Washington some 15 years ago. (Relax Sidney, it was totally innocent. I won't even repeat what was said.) I have followed her career ever since. And it has, to say the least, been colorful. (No pun intended.) 

Girlfriend told the tea party folks to "go straight to hell", recently, and, as you can imagine, wingnuts are "fit to be tied."

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” said Waters. “This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned, the ‘tea party’ can go straight to hell.”

Mrs. Waters, I am sure that they are all convinced that they are going to that other place. You know the one. Where they have all the Angels, milk and honey, and no black folks. So I bet that you telling them to "go straight to hell" must have really pissed them off.

Anywhoo, I love Maxine's fight. And before you wingnuts think it's only the right she has it in for, Maxine has made it quite clear that even our boy O is going to get the business from her if he doesn't get his s&^% together. She wants O to pay more attention to black folks, and she is letting her constituents know that she will be holding his feet to the fire. This seems to have become a trend: Black folks have become somewhat frustrated with O, and they are letting their politicians know about it.

"The economy, the loss of jobs, the pain is real. We’re talking about indisputable facts,” she said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We’ve got to be in the discussion. We want to be part of the solution. We cannot continue to go on watching everybody talk about what the solutions are without us being included in it,”

I agree with her there. I know that O and his peeps will be looking for a large voter turnout from old reliable, and it would help him in key swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. But if these Negroes in places like Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Tampa, and Jacksonville stay home, O better start packing his bags for that long ride back to the Windy City. It's no secret where the next presidential election will be won or lost: In northern suburbs with independent white voters, and the turn out in urban areas in key swing states. That's it. No need to listen to all the political pundits on television bore you for hours with red state blue state crap. I just gave you the key to winning in November, 2012 in a couple of sentences.

So Maxine is right.  O and his people have to address urban issues in the larger discussion about economic recovery. What good is it going to do if home values go up again and Tyrone keeps breaking in to my nice new home because he can't find a job or wants to support a drug habit? Or, unemployment drops for the rest of A-merry-ca and stays at double digits for poorly educated urban youths with nothing to look forward to but a long criminal record? We have all these great resources at our finger tips and at some point we are going to have to start connecting the dots.Politicians (both locally and nationally) are not doing that, and we are going to pay for it down the line. The truth is, we are probably paying for it already.

Finally, every time you think that Governor Big Hair is a legitimate candidate for president of these divided states, or every time he questions O's patriotism or love of country; just remember the following quote from him just a couple of years ago:

"Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” Perry said. “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”

And with that, I rest my case.

 

  

We need more government, not less.

Sorry to post so late tonight folks, but I was actually sitting on the Ben Franklin Bridge and trying to decide if I should jump or not. SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR POINTS? WTF? The sixth worst point drop in Dow history. Thank you tea party. Your political gamesmanship was really good for the country.*sarcasm off* 

"Standard & Poor's downgrade of America's debt couldn't come at a worse time. The result is likely to be higher borrowing costs for the government at all levels, and higher interest on your variable-rate mortgage, your auto loan, your credit card loans, and every other penny you borrow.
Why did S&P do it?

Not because America failed to pay its creditors on time. As you may have noticed, we avoided a default.

And not because we might fail to pay our bills at the end of 2012 if tea-party Republicans again hold the nation hostage when their votes will next be needed to raise the debt ceiling. This is a legitimate worry and might have been grounds for a downgrade, but it's not S&P's rationale.

S&P has downgraded the U.S. because it doesn't think we're on track to reduce the nation's debt enough to satisfy S&P -- and we're not doing it in a way S&P prefers.

Here's what S&P said: "The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics." S&P also blames what it considers to be weakened "effectiveness, stability, and predictability" of U.S. policy making and political institutions.

Pardon me for asking, but who gave Standard & Poor's the authority to tell America how much debt it has to shed, and how?

If we pay our bills, we're a good credit risk. If we don't, or aren't likely to, we're a bad credit risk. When, how, and by how much we bring down the long term debt -- or, more accurately, the ratio of debt to GDP -- is none of S&P's business.
S&P's intrusion into American politics is also ironic because, as I pointed out recently, much of our current debt is directly or indirectly due to S&P's failures (along with the failures of the two other major credit-rating agencies -- Fitch and Moody's) to do their jobs before the financial meltdown. Until the eve of the collapse S&P gave triple-A ratings to some of the Street's riskiest packages of mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations." [Story]

Exactly Mr. Reich. Ironic indeed. The very people who are partly responsible for putting us in this mess, now have the nerve to tell us that they are going to have to downgrade our credit rating. That's like a thief coming into your home, stealing your big screen television, and then complaining to you that the picture isn't clear enough. The nerve!

Meanwhile O is still talking about our deficit problem....huh? O, here is a memo from the field: F&^% the deficit problem! We need jobs! Still, if you insist on going down this road, here is how you solve your little deficit problem: Raise taxes, get the f*&^ out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and start talking about putting people to work. We should be spending more not less. How are you going to stimulate job growth if you are cutting three trillion dollars in federal spending? That is lunacy. But it's just what these wingnuts want, to beat our government into submission. It is the fundamental difference between these folks and those of us who are... well... actually sane. We believe that it is our government's job to make society work in a better more efficient manner. The wingnut, on the other hand, sees our government as the enemy. They fail to realize, of course, that they are the government; we all are.

I will leave you with the words of Dick Polman:

"Obama, having weathered the ginned-up debt-ceiling crisis, is again declaring that he wants to "put America back to work," but those words are hollow. He's handcuffed by this deal. He and the Democrats won't have the money to launch any big job-creation programs even if they muster the will to try.

Of course, that's precisely what the Republicans intended - to starve the government. Most Americans probably don't agree with that strategy, but since when do they have a say? Polls suggest they just want to get back to work, by any means possible. Last month, when Gallup asked people to name their most important issue, 31 percent cited the "economy in general"; 27 percent cited "unemployment/jobs." A distant third, at 16 percent, was "federal budget deficit/debt."

This is a time when the jobs crisis requires more government spending, not less. Consumers won't prime the economic pump, because they're still in a fetal position. Private businesses won't hire, because they're still playing it safe. There's a myth going around - brought to you by the same people who deny climate change - that the 2009 stimulus was a failure. Congressional Budget Office and Commerce Department figures say otherwise; the stimulus plan saved millions of jobs and would have created more had it been bigger."

Thank you Mr. Polman.

Now if you will all excuse me, I have to go and check out some more bridges.


















 

Let us pray for good credit.

So A-merry-ca's credit rating took a hit from one of the three major agencies that does these types of things. Now she probably knows how so much of her citizens feel. And let's go ahead and tell the joke now, because I know that it's out there; it's just that you white folks can't say it around us: " We should have known that our credit was going to get f^%$#d up when we put a black man in charge. You know they don't know how to handle money." It's a joke, but in many ways it's quite serious. It goes to the mindset of many of the tea party folks, who, all of a sudden, decided (after eight years of George Bush) that spending large sums of money unchecked wasn't such a good thing. Why now?

Thank goodness the A-merry-can people haven't totally lost their minds. There is evidence out there that would tend to suggest that they know exactly who is to blame for the mess that we are in. I will give you a hint: it ain't the tall skinny guy with the Muslim sounding name.

"Father, our heart breaks for America," Perry said in 12 minutes of remarks that included prayer and Bible passages — but no direct mention of politics or his presidential plans. "We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us."

That wasn't a Muslim prayer, that was Governor Big Hair sending one up to the big gal on what is being styled as a National Day of Prayer. He even prayed for the president. How nice. Folks held hands and formed prayer circles while they wept. It was a sincere outreach to the gal up above.

"And Perry, himself, huddled on the stage in a prayer circle with several ministers who helped lead the event. It was Perry's idea and was financed by the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Miss.-based group that opposes abortion and gay rights and believes that the First Amendment freedom of religion applies only to Christians......

'We feel that God moved on him to do this'. It will be read by the enemy, the political enemy, as a tool to win votes,'said Gwen Courkamp of Houston, who plans to vote for Perry if he runs for president." [Source]

Of course "God moved on him" to do it. He needs someone to fight off those Socialist devils and heathens who are so prevalent in our society. All I can say is let us pray.... 



 



   

We are all tea party hostages.

This debt ceiling bill is bull s&^t! And it was a phony issue created by wingnuts and the tea party crowd to slash benefits and the safety net for the folks who need it most here in A-merry-ca. Congress has never failed to vote for raising the debt ceiling before, but these are strange times here in A-merry-ca. People can't find work, people who have wealth are just sitting on it and are not investing, and our government is so dysfunctional that their approval rating is lower than that of a convicted pedophile.

I love how Katrina vanden Heuvel summed it all up:

"In the melodrama that is consuming Washington this hot summer, featuring the spectacle of how much Tea Party Republicans will be able to extort for agreeing not to blow up the economy, the values and priorities of most Americans were early casualties. That reality will drive — no matter what the resolution this week — new, independent citizen mobilizations challenging both Republican zealotry and Democratic cravenness.

The debt-ceiling debate has lasted long enough for most Americans to start paying attention and to realize just how divorced both parties are from basic common sense. With the economy faltering and 25 million people in need of full-time work, most Americans want Washington focused on how to create jobs and get the economy going, not on slashing spending for the rising number of poor children while sheltering tax havens for millionaires.

Equally inexplicable is the president’s apparent eagerness to negotiate with a legislative faction willing to hold the entire economy hostage — and one prepared to extort concessions in backroom deals that it could not achieve in any normal legislative process. Negotiating with fiscal terrorists only encourages them.
On National Public Radio last week, Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican deputy whip, was giddy about the potential for calamity. Asked if it was a mistake to try to cut spending by threatening the U.S. economy, Cole replied: “No, I don’t think so. Frankly, I think it’s one of the good things that’s come out of this. We’ll never have a debt-ceiling increase again without serious efforts to deal with the long-term spending.”

Whatever the terms of the eventual agreement, we know they will be remarkably cruel. As Robert Greenstein, the respected director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted last week that every plan on the table now is far worse — cutting more from programs for the poor, exacting pain on the most vulnerable in our society — than anything Jim DeMint, the most extreme right-wing senator of all, was demanding last year." [Source]

O, this is not change that I can believe in. I understand that there is a degree of politics involved here, so you had to kick the can down the road after 2012. But did you have to let the wingnuts pick the can to kick, the shoes you will use to kick it, and which one of your feet you will kick it with? No wonder your base is fit to be tied and the leader of the CBC is calling this proposed debt ceiling bill a "Satan Sandwich". (Tea party sandwich, "Satan sandwich, what's the difference?)

Finally, if you happen to be a black man in A-merry-ca, you just might want to start putting your money under the mattress. Why? Because your black ass just might end up in jail for putting your own money in the bank.