An International Democracy Conspiracy?

"A proper measure of democracy should be put into effect in the army, chiefly by abolishing the feudal practice of bullying and beating and by having officers and men share weal and woe. Once this is done, unity will be achieved between officers and men, the combat effectiveness of the army will be greatly increased, and there will be no doubt of our ability to sustain the long, cruel war.

Anyone should be allowed to speak out, whoever he may be, so long as he is not a hostile element and does not make malicious attacks, and it does not matter if he says something wrong. Leaders at all levels have the duty to listen to others. Two principles must be observed: (1) Say what you know and say it without reserve; (2) Don't blame the speaker but take his words as a warning. Unless the principle of "Don't blame the speaker" is observed genuinely and not falsely, the result will not be: "Say what you know and say it without reserve."

Both in the army and in the local organizations, inner-Party democracy is meant to strengthen discipline and increase combat effectiveness, not to weaken them."

Mao Zedong
Little Red Book

On Second Thought...

"The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is the objective law independent of man's will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.

There is a serious tendency towards capitalism among the well-to-do peasants. This tendency will become rampant if we in the slightest way neglect political work among the peasants during the co-operative movement and for a long period after.

Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are "poor and blank." This may seem to be a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful picture can be painted."

Moa Zedong
Little Reb Book

Vampire Capitalism

"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."

Karl Marx

Are The Times A Changin'?

“As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing”

Karl Rove
"The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head."

Aristide Briand
French Prime Minister

"We must help all the young people to understand that ours is still a very poor country, that we cannot change this situation radically in a short time, and that only through the united efforts of our younger generation and all of the people, working with their own hands, can China be made strong and prosperous within a period of several decades. The establishment of our socialist system has opened the road leading to the ideal society of the future, but to translate this ideal into reality needs hard work."

Moa Zeddong
Little Red Book


"The political party that will benefit from the coming realignment is not preordained. The campaigns, candidates, and events of the rest of this decade will determine which party gains the lifelong allegiance of this new generation and, with it, a dominant advantage in the next civic era of American politics."

Morley Winograd & Michael D. Hais
Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics

...and the walls came tumbling down

“In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.”

Fran Lebowitz

Grave Times For Dead Economists

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
Economist ,journalist, financier

The Incredible Disappearing Elephant

Reporting on the new ABC/Washington Post poll has mostly focused on support for a public health care option. But the poll also shows that, while Republicans have succeeded in stonewalling Democratic initiatives in Congress, they have not managed to rebuild their party.

Only 20 percent of respondents identified themselves as Republicans -- the lowest number since 1983.

Read more @Huffington Post.

...not mention of where the TEA Party stands in the numbers.

Becking To Differ

“That's right. Our march to socialism. You know, some say that Barack Obama, that cat's a socialist, man. Others say, no, no, he's just really unlucky. Every policy he happens to support just, dumb, stupid luck, brings us toward socialism. That's it. I mean, brings us there quickly, like at a trillion times the speed of light. And I know the number "Trillion" because we seem to be using it an awful lot lately. I believe that it's just luck myself, dumb, hapless luck. Sometimes that luck works out perfectly.”

Glenn Beck


Concerning Bush's $3.1 trillion budget for 2009:

"Under the Bush administration proposal, they are building a wall of debt. At the end of his first year, the gross debt of the United States stood at 5.8 trillion [dollars]. If you look at the end of his eight years of responsibility, we see the debt as over $10.4 trillion. That is almost a doubling of the national debt on his watch."

Ken Conrad - Democrat
Senate Budget Committee Chairman

"Obama's a market guy. He's not any kind of socialist at all. He's not challenging the of corporations. The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far-reaching...I mean it's laugh out loud, really."

Frank Llewellyn
Democratic socialists of America

Notes From The Ahmadinejad Wing of the GOP

"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves."

Edwin Merwin Jr. and Jim Ulmer
GOP Party Officials From South Carolina
In newspaper op-ed piece


"...the image of the Jew as penny-pincher was a praise of Jewish frugality. In fact, it dates back to the centuries of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to own land or conduct any business other than money-lending, which was closed to Christians by Church law. It is an image of a kind and of a time with forcing Jews to wear a badge on their clothing or enclosing them in ghettos, cutting them off from religious, social, and economic freedom."

Matthew Brooks
Republican Jewish Coalition

TEA Party Pooper

Hudson TEA Party

Where Are My Snow Shovels?

I could tell it had snow, before I got out of bed this morning. It was before sunrise and it looked very light out. Sure enough, one look out the window and I could see the snow. When I came home from watching the Twins get swept by the Yankees at 10 PM, the sky was all stars and no clouds. Seeing the snow, it was clear that the reason I took today off from work was going to be delayed...till Saturday, I decided sleeping in on Monday morning was a noble cause. I was half expecting my wife to wake me up and tell me President Obama had won the Nobel Prize For Economics.

Friday, which I also had off and also slept in, the wife did wake me up with the Obama Nobel Peace Prize news. My wife was quite shocked when I dared ask what Obama had done to get the prize. Of course, she has more Obama posters and stickers in her exercise room that I have. The thought never occurred to her that just being Obama was good enough.

I expected conservative talk radio to be on the tipping point of revolution -- as always -- over the news. The convenience store girl was all excited about the news, when I got my coffee. The library lady was excited too. My brother even interrupted his retirement, afternoon nap to call and see what I thought about it all.

It was thinking they should change the name to the McPeace Prize, until I heard that the 1938 Peace Prize was a tie between Hitler and Gandhi. The committee gave the prize to Michael Hansson, President of the Nansen International Office for Refugees. After hearing this and knowing the Obama didn't have any say in the nomination, I figure he was in order for congratulations.

...but then again, maybe politics is like professional wrestling. Things have slowed down with the Town Hall TEA Party meetings, Obama has turn his gaze away from health care to Afghanistan and maybe the conservatives and liberals decided we needed some political spice in our life. Hence, give Obama the prize an give Hannity, Beck and Limbaugh something to get them through the weekend. When you get right down to it, the Nobel Peace Prize is a contradiction in itself. It was founded by the inventory of dynamite.

In 2007, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Last week I was going through some of my stuff and found a National Geographic from 1976 with an article about the coming Ice Age. This morning I wake up to the second snow fall of the 2009-2010 winter and we are only 12 days into October.

Does anybody know if Gore has to return a portion of his prize, if the world starts cooling down? Maybe he could donate it to the people's in areas that haven't had snow for generations. But then again, my wife reminded me that it's not "global warming," it's "climate change."

Whatever it is, I just hope I can get my shovels and snowblower out of the shed on Saturday.

Really

Flight Of The Political Bird

"When politcs goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone."

Alan Wolfe
The Future Of Liberalsim


"...The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

No one dared attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as if to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and the another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death..."

Loren Eiseley
The Judgement of the Birds

2012 GOTea

Capitalism: A Love Story

"Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy."

Michael Moore
Conclusion of upcoming movie Capitalism: A Love Story

In The Sperm Of The Moment

"In another stunning example of hypocrisy, congressional Democrats are wasting taxpayers' time and resources on a legislative measure to censure Congressman Joe Wilson so they don't have to talk about their exceedingly unpopular health care plan. If we are going to march members down to the well of the House to apologize, Joe Wilson is going to have to get in line behind Nancy Pelosi, who attacked the intelligence community who protects us, Charlie Rangel who cheated on his taxes, Jack Murtha – a walking scandal, and we all know how the Democratic leadership tried to protect William Jefferson. Democrats don't want an apology. They want a side show."

Michael Steele
GOP National Committee Chairman

Free-market Credibility Gap Widens

"...The public trust deficit hangs over all companies and free-market capitalism, not just the financial sector, and the trust deficit is playing a major role in current debates over increased government regulation of the economy. It is a major mistake for leaders in business and the gatekeeping professions such as law not to undertake a serious self-assessment of responsibility for the current catastrophe with proposals and action to rebuild public trust.

Much is at stake. I am among those millions of Americans who, over the last 40 years, concluded that a strong presumption in favor of market solutions rather than government regulation offered the best hope for addressing many of society's challenges. Both Democratic and Republican administrations supported deregulation of banking and finance, programs to increase home ownership and an easy money policy -- so long as it did not lead to serious inflation.

We trusted in the prudential judgment of business leaders to make rational decisions that would avoid financial catastrophe. But we now are questioning whether we substantially overinvested in the ideology of free-market capitalism.

We realize that capitalism has an inherent struggle in which excessive short-term self-interest and hubris sometimes trump the "self-interest considered upon the whole" that generates long-term wealth creation..."

Neil Hamilton
Star Tribune

Free Market Sole Searching

"Profit-seeking business is compelled to employ the most efficient methods of production. What checks a businessmans endeavors to improve the equipment of his firm is only lack of capital."

Ludwig von Mises
Human Action

TEA Pee

Don't Like Your TEA Party "Black"

"ABC and NBC on Tuesday night joined the effort to undermine the anti-Obama tea party participants by smearing them as racists as ABC framed a story around the proposition “some prominent Obama supporters are now saying” the opposition to Obama is “driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President,” while NBC anchor Brian Williams touted how “former President Carter spoke up and spoke out about” the supposed racism. Williams alleged “a certain number of signs and images at last weekend's big tea party march in Washington and at other recent events have featured racial and other violent themes and President Carter today said he is extremely worried by it.”

News Busters


"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American. I live in the south and I've seen the south come a long way and I've seen the rest of the country that shared the south's attitude toward minority groups, at that time particularly African-Americans, that that racism [unintelligible word] still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of belief among many white people, not just in the south, but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance and grieves me and concerns me very deeply."

Former President Jimmy Carter


"They've waved signs likening President Obama to Hitler and the devil, raised questions about whether he was really born in this country, falsely accused him of planning to set up death panels, decried his speech to students as indoctrination and called him everything from a fascist to a socialist to a communist. And that was before Mr. Obama's speech was interrupted by a Representative who once fought to keep the Confederate flag waving over the South Carolina state house. Add it all up, and some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President."

Charlie Gibson
ABC News Anchor


“People are not just mad at Obama. They're mad at Jesse Jackson, they're mad at Reverend Wright, they're made at Al Sharpton, they're mad at people who have nothing to do with Obama except they all happen to be black.”

Clarence Page
Chicago Tribune


WOLF BLITZER: They've come together under the tea party banner, but within the movement you're going to find individuals outraged over taxes, health reform, gun control and more. But, most disturbing, a very small but vocal minority, they're targeting President Obama's race. Let's go to CNN's Elaine Quijano. She's working this story for us. Elaine, what are we seeing?

ELAINE QUIJANO: Well, Wolf, we have to emphasize by far most tea party protesters are not casting their arguments in what could be seen as a racial light, but a small group of demonstrators is using a controversial image that's been circulating on the Web since July. Within the larger tea party movement that's gained steam across the country, a small but passionate minority is also voicing what some see as racist rhetoric, including this doctored image circulating on the Internet and even some protesters signs like this one in Brighton, Michigan, portraying President Obama as a witch doctor. We took to the streets of Washington to get reaction.

WOMAN: I think it's disrespectful to the office of the President to portray him in this manner. It's racist.

SECOND WOMAN: This is appalling.

QUIJANO: How prevalent were the protesters carrying racially-charged messages? Difficult to quantify? CNN all platform journalist Jim Spellman spent weeks covering the tea party demonstrators as a whole.

JIM SPELLMAN: Only a handful of people seem to outwardly have racial issues with the President, but the more you talk to people, you could sense that it was part of a larger distrust.

QUIJANO: For their party tea party leaders disavow any racist views.

MARK WILLIAMS, TEA PARTY ORGANIZER: I saw very little overt racism or anger, and those were on the fringes and were marginalized.

QUIJANO: They want attention focused on the role and reach of government into people's lives but say that controversial protesters have the right to speak their mind.


Slogans gracing TEA Party signs:

“Bury ObamaCare with Kennedy”

“Change We Don't Believe In”

“Hitler Gave Good Speeches Too”

“Just Say No to Socialized Medicine”

“Throw All of the Bums Out”
---
In the pictures above, how many non-Whites can you find?

From the picture below, can you guess why the TEA Party participants hate ACORN so much?


"President Carter is flat out wrong. This isn't about race. It is about policy. This is a pathetic distraction by Democrats to shift attention away from the president's wildly unpopular government-run healthcare plan that the American people simply oppose."

Michael Steele
GOP Chairman

The Big Republican TEA Party Lie

“[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Adolph Hitler
Mein Kampf (1925)


"What makes that passage so monstrously mind-bending is that Hitler was accusing the Jews of engaging in the big lie, when in fact the Nazis would be history’s greatest practitioners...The GOP’s avid willingness to wield the big lie makes the comparison valid."

Andrew Leonard
Salon.com

Hostili-TEA

"Caused by a profound self-doubt, self condemnation and fear. Hostility is a type of projection that directs towards other people the hatred which the hostile person feels towards himself. Blaming the evil of others for his own shortcomings, he feels the chronic need to justify himself by demonstrating their evil by seeking it, by hunting for it, and by inventing it."

Ayn Rand

The Mouthpieces Of The 2009 TEA Party Revolution

Out Maneuvering The 2nd Amendment

Researchers find out-of-state markets to be leading source of crime guns in California, havens for racism


"From pocket-size assault weapons and sniper rifles that can kill a man a mile and a half away to incendiary armor-piercing bullets, you can find what you are looking for at gun shows across the United States -- even if you do not want your name to appear on any paperwork.

In hidden-camera photos and videos captured by UC Davis researchers, men roamed gun shows with assault rifles slung over their shoulders and pistols tucked in their belts, available for sale with no waiting period, background check or paper trail.


Even at licensed dealers, some with more than 1,000 pistols and rifles at a single booth, there were illegal "straw buys" in which real gun buyers concealed their identities by getting other people to put down their names

Pistols rest on a table at a recent gun show. The pistols, which can take sound suppressors and are larger than regular pistols, are copies of the M-10, an automatic sub-machine gun made famous by gunmaker Ingram. The pistols are not available for sale by licensed gun dealers in California because they are not on the Approved Handgun Roster, but they can and are sold in other states, such as Nevada. In some cases, the dealer obviously recognized the "straw buy" but sold the firearm anyway..."

Read more @The Daily Democrat.

Get a 2nd opinion @ News Busters.

TEA Party Tap Dances Over School Speech

TEA Party Hero Apologies -- He's Off The Island

I guess the Congressman has been attending too many TEA Parties and just lost his mind...considering the TEA Party, that would be an oxymoron.

The whole country watched Wednesday night when Republican Rep. Joe Wilson yelled out "You lie!" during President Barack Obama's televised speech about his health care proposal.

To which Obama calmly replied, "That's not true."

"I was embarrassed for the chamber and a Congress I love," Vice President Joe Biden said on ABC News this morning. "It demeaned the institution."

Sen. John McCain also found it unconscionable. "Wilson's behavior was 'totally disrespectful,' he said on CNN. "There is no place for it in that setting, or any other, and he should apologize for it immediately."


Wilson's office did issue an apology for his accusation that the president was lying about illegal immigrants getting coverage under his healthcare plan.

"This evening I let my emotions get the best of me," the South Carolina Republican said in a statement. "While I disagree with the president's statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility."

What do you think? Was his behavior unforgivable? Is his apology enough? Or should he make another apology to Obama in person?

Tell us!

Seems to me the Bush administration did more than its share of lying, WMD, terrorists in Iraq and on and on.

How come no one yelled 'You lie!' at George W, Bush or Dick Cheney?

From LA Times

And You Thought the TEA Party Birthers Were Nuts

"...retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson says the government has prepared 1,000 camps for its own citizens. He also says the government has stored 30,000 guillotines to murder its critics, and has stashed 500,000 caskets in Georgia and Montana for the remains.

Why guillotines? "Because," he wrote in a report obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, "beheading is the most efficient means of harvesting body parts."

In a second warning, the Web site Worldnetdaily.com says that the government is considering Nazi-like concentration camps for dissidents.

Jerome Corsi, the author of "The Obama Nation," an anti-Obama book, says that a proposal in Congress "appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany."

Another Web site, Americanfreepress.net, says the proposal "would create a Guantanamo-style setting after martial law is declared."

There's no evidence of such a plan..."


Read more @ Miami Herald

Why Johnny Birch Can't Think For Himself

Tomorrow Obama will deliver a national address directly to students, which will be the first day of classes for many children across the country. The address, to be broadcast live on the White House's Web site, was announced in a letter to school principals last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Obama intends to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning," Duncan wrote. Obama will also call for a "shared responsibility" among students, parents and educators to maximize learning potential.

"The goal of the speech and the lesson plans is to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, doing their homework and goals that parents and teachers alike can agree are noble. This isn't a policy speech. This is a speech designed to encourage kids to stay in school."

Tommy Vietor
White House Spokesperson

Numerous conservatives have claimed that President Obama's upcoming September 8 speech about "persisting and succeeding in school," along with classroom activities about the "importance of education," will "indoctrinate" and "brainwash" schoolchildren. Conservatives have compared Obama's address to Chinese communism and the Hitler Youth, while also calling for parents to "keep your kids home" from the "fascist in chief."

"In general, I don't think there's a problem if the president uses the bully pulpit to tell kids to work hard, study hard and things like that. But there are some troubling hints in this, both educationally and politically...It essentially tries to force kids to say the president and the presidency is inspiring, and that's very problematic. It's very concerning that you would do that."

Neal McCluskey
Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

"I don't think it's appropriate for teachers to ask students to help promote the president's preferred school reforms and policies. It very much starts to set up the president as a superintendent in chief."

Frederick Hess
American Enterprise Institute

"...it seems very close to indoctrination..."

Sean Hannity
FOX New Host

"...just when you think this administration can't get any more surreal and Orwellian, here they come to indoctrinate our kids..."

Monica Crawley
FOX News Commentator

"...the left has always used kids in public schools as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda..."

Michelle Malkin
Frequent FOX News pundit

RIP Reaganomics

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1937)


"...Let's talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the "magic of the marketplace" were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn't happen.

To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third of its growth over the previous 27 years.

Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there's the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

There's a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: Politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came..."

Paul Krugman
Read more...


"Ronald Reagan cut everything in the budget, and yet they say he made the biggest deficit (until George W. Bush) in the country. I don't know how they come up with that. It's Washington math."

Rush Limbaugh
on the Radio

Reagan didn't cut the military budget. It reached historic highs. Under Reagan, the national debt more than doubled.

Town Hall Update

Budgets & Debt: Where The Truth Lies

"We are, quite bluntly, broke. We don't have the money to sustain the dreams and experiments of liberalism any longer. We have a $400 billion a year budget deficit and a $4 trillion debt."

Rush Limbaugh
The Way Things Ought To Be (1992)
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.

O'Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush's economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.

O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due." A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.

The vice president's office had no immediate comment, but John Snow, who replaced O'Neill, insisted that deficits "do matter" to the administration.

Read more...


"...The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it's not catastrophic.

The only real reason for concern is political. The United States can deal with its debts if politicians of both parties are, in the end, willing to show at least a bit of maturity. Need I say more?

Let's start with the effects of this year's deficit.

There are two main reasons for the surge in red ink. First, the recession has led both to a sharp drop in tax receipts and to increased spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs. Second, there have been large outlays on financial rescues. These are counted as part of the deficit, although the government is acquiring assets in the process and will eventually get at least part of its money back.

What this tells us is that right now it's good to run a deficit. Consider what would have happened if the U.S. government and its counterparts around the world had tried to balance their budgets as they did in the early 1930s. It's a scary thought. If governments had raised taxes or slashed spending in the face of the slump, if they had refused to rescue distressed financial institutions, we could all too easily have seen a full replay of the Great Depression.
As I said, deficits saved the world..."

Paul Krugman

Read more...

"That means our debt - yearly debt - is only 2.9 percent of our total budget. If you at home could say that the total amount of your debt was only 2.9 percent of all that you earn and produce, you'd be happy/ This deficit is a straw dog. It's always been a phone monster. This is manageable debt as long as our economy stays strong."

Rush Limbuagh
July 7, 1994

"...my friends, we know what Obama's economics are built on. We know what his new foundation is. His new foundation is built on money we don't have. His foundation is built on money created out of thin air and debt. Debt that is an anchor around all of our collective necks, so heavy is the anchor, we, the people can't move. We're weighed down by a plan that's designed to pull off a seismic switcheroo. We're going for an economy driven by the private sector to one driven by Obama, except we aren't told that. We're told the exact opposite. Barack Obama is building a new economy on a foundation of so much debt that he has reached into our children's and grandchildren's pockets. They will be born broke. It's called generational theft. He calls it his new foundation. The foundation is debt, printed money. We know that but we don't hear that, and that's because Obama can't get what he wants by telling the truth. No liberal can..."

Rush Limbaugh
Radio show transcript April 15, 2009

TEA Party Needs A Few More Nut Jobs

"...the Nazis were the ones who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window to compete to see how many "little Jews" could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, stomped a pregnant woman to death, who snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, "tore him as one would tear a rag."

That's who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen - those obscenities plus 6 million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.

You would think that where they are invoked to make a point, it would be done with a respect for the incalculable evil the Nazis represent. You would think people would tread carefully, not because of the potential insult to a given politician (they are big boys and girls) but because to do otherwise profanes the profound and renders trivial that which ought to be held sacred by anyone who regards himself as a truly human being.

But in modern America, unfortunately, rhetoric often starts over the top and goes up from there. So fine, George W. Bush is "a smirking chimp." Fine, Barack Obama is "a Chicago thug." We have a Constitution, after all, and it says we can say whatever we want. It doesn't say that it has to be intelligent.

And yes, you are even protected if you liken Obama or Bush to Hitler."

Leonard Pitts Jr.

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Freedom Of Screech

"...I never thought I'd see the day when America didn't have enough crazies to go around. We've got oodles of them. So many that members of Congress, home on recess to press the flesh, are afraid to appear at public forums for fear they will be asked their position on Bigfoot sightings and alien abductions. One of Minnesota's most levelheaded congressmen, Democrat Collin Peterson, had to apologize for saying that 25 percent of his constituents believe in conspiracy theories. He didn't back down completely, though, explaining he was tired of public meetings being "hijacked" by people "outside the mainstream..."



"...The summer of 2009 is making the Summer of Sam (1977) and the summer of Helter Skelter (1969) look sane by comparison. In the old days, a handful of psychopaths could ruin our sense of security. This summer, the lunacy has gone viral and is making us look like a country of snake handlers and sleight-of-hand "healers" who make us feel better by "removing" chicken parts from our innards.

Our civic religion preaches the virtue of conversation and compromise, the belief that we can, as the Lord advised, "come and reason together." But reasoning together has gone out the window this summer of our discontent, along with the baby, the bath water and grandma's Do Not Resuscitate order..."

Nick Coleman
Read more at the Star Tribune