The Biggest Political Mistake Of Their Lives

Sometimes the old lessons are the hardest to learn

And the truth of the matter is that sometimes
 you really do - never get a Second Chance
 to make a good First Impression

Bob Dylan said it long ago.  "The Times They Are A Changing".  Rush Limbaugh said this morning that he could not properly “sort out the mess” (my quotes) that is this payroll tax cut extension bill.  But Randy Rhodes did a very good job of it at noon.  First of all what the Senate passed was not just this tax cut extension but it also included restoring cuts that had been made in Madicare that Judy was complaining about last Thursday where doctors would refuse to treat medicare patients if they didn’t get paid.  Also unemployment coverage was extended.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of candidate’s positions without a score card.  Newt Gingrich had made a really big thing out of his ability to “get it done’ and make the needed compromises with the President like he did with Clinton in 1996.  However as you may know by now, candidates have this nasty habbit of reversing their positions if they don’t get the thumbs up from Rush Limbaugh and this is the case again today.  This morning Rush says that Newt sent him an E mail saying that he is against the senate bill that was passed and that John Boehner should not call the house back into session to pass the Senate bill.  As you may know the House convened this morning as a procedural guimic and he gaveled the House to order and they recited the Pledge of Allegence and then he gavvled the sessions closed and he adjourned and walked out.  Then he pulled the microphone of a house member who was still speaking about the perils of not passing the Senate bill.  Finally he had C-Span pull their camera coverage all together.  This is the most blatent display of tea party arrogance to date yet.  This is the political “smoking gun” that Democrats have been looking for and were you listening to Newt only last week, it was something that no republican would DARE let happen.  But it did.  And now they will have to live down the biggest mistake they have made and may ever make in their short lived political carriers.

Rush Limbaugh’s show this morning was the usual hopeless mass of hysteria and emotional catharsis mixed with a lot of invective.  He kept referring to the First Lady as “Michelle, my belle” and made much of Michelle and the girls going to Hawaiiai ahead of the President.  Rush asked why the President just doesn’t pull up stakes and head off on vacation himself and claim victory now that he has “made his point” that the republicans are intransigent.  He never answered this question, but it’s one this writer would be curious to know.  Rush then attacked the whole idea of a payroll tax cut saying that it was not even a “tax cut” but a “raid on funds” that we pay into.  I am inclined to agree.  But the point is we need the stimulus right now and this is the whole reason why John Boehner has worked so hard to defeat it the same way they would not even debate Obama’s jobs proposals of last fall.  Because despite the bombardment of favorable economic news lately, the news would be even better by now were these Presidential jobs proposals enacted into law.  Rush then said something he may not admit that he said, but he did.  He said “Of course you all know that I’ve been wanting the President to fail.  But the trouble is that the President has not failed and that’s the problem”.  Then he went on to talk about this “media conspiracy” (in the vein of Judy) to make the President look good.  There was an MSNBC poll that said that most Americans don’t mind paying their taxes; they just want the rich to pay their fair share.  There was some other “non partisan” polling group that concluded the same thing in their tabulations.  Also there is the scathing Wall Street journal article talking about the “Bad optics” of this whole congressional process, and how it’s the republicans’ worst nightmare, being in a position of being the party who is Against tax cuts for the average working American.  Of course the good economic news continues.  California’s unemployment rate stands at 11.3% and yet in terms of numbers they have added more people to payrolls than any other state.  They said that in 43 states the unemployment rate has dropped sharply.  Also there is talk of the economy spontaneously picking up due to natural gas discoveries in Ohio and also this oil boom on the high plains.  Also small businesses are taking off.  It seems that George Bush gutted the staff of the small business administration to make room for these big corporate push outs of the Mom & Pop stores.  President Obama has sought to build up the small business administration.  Rush Limbaugh has also lit into Mit Romney calling his attacks on Gingrich a “scorched earth” policy.   Rush was upset, and this is so looney it sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit, but it happened.  Rush Limbaugh is upset because Mit Romney on an interview did NOT label President Obama as a socialist when pressed on the matter.  Rush was outrages.  Rush then attacked the media for only referring to Kim Jung Il, alias Kim Jung “Dead” as “inigmatic’ and saving their worst condemnation for people like Newt Gingrich.  People like Judy and Rush have elevated Newt Gingrich to the level of some sort of Savior.  Rush went on to say that he wished Romney had called President Obama a “Marxist”.  And then goes on to lament how “the truth” is not allowed to be spoken in the media today.  I just noticed all the speech stuff superimposed itself on the usual icon row.  I minimized it.  (?)  Rush Limbaugh says he trusts the speech controls over his typing.  Believe me, my typing is a hell of a lot more accurate than that speech recognization stuff is.  I’ve tried it.  Rush is just too lazy to do a little wor.  (what a bit surprise!)   Also Rush on his show talked about surveys about fat people.  It seems it’s OK for women to call men fat, but it’s wrong for a man to call a woman fat.  Well, that’s just being a gentleman.  I’m surprised Rush has any civility at all.  To summarize I just don’t think it’s even emotionally healthy for Rush Limbaugh to work himself into such an emotional froth over what apparently is a development he favors because it keeps the social security fund from being “raided” as he puts it.  So one might turn the question around why Rush himself just doesn’t “claim victory”?

I think the American people would just rather celebrate the Holidays and enjoy what little positive economic news there is these days and not to be downed by all this doom and gloom rhetoric by people like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.  The thing is that Newt doesn’t even now have a campaign organization and has been less than diligent about regular campaign appearances in Iowa.  Even now here are people who argue that Newt, like Cain before him, is just out to increase book sales.  It’s clear to Americans that they don’t want a man with Newt Gingrich’s temperament on the nuclear button.  Not someone who recently said that they should send out federal marshals to round out Supreme Court Justices who make decisions he disagrees with. It bothers me that Born Again Christians would single out Newt Gingrich as the most qualified man in America to become the 45^th President of the United States.  Every dog has his day but Newt’s season has come and gone.  There are a lot of positive developments such that this administration passed the Dodd – Frank law that insures that these financial crooks will never again be bailed out by the tax-payers of America, a topic that was not so surprisingly absent in all of today’s blatherings.  Bear this thought in mind that the President has a 44% approval rating but approval of Congress is but 11%.  I imagine after the outrage of the past few days, the next poll will show congressional approval even lower and the President’s approval numbers- - higher.  The dirty little secret is that Americans have a natural distrust of “big money” and believe that politicians work by a different set of rules from the ones the rest of us live by.  Capish?  No, ‘Newt-Romney” never talks about how much this Wall Street bail out costs the American taxpayer.  I have a particular bias against Newt Gingrich and the sooner he is GONE from the political scene, the happier I’ll be.    It seems as if left wing Talk Radio has become more popular in American now, being on more stations.  It would not even occur to most people to be as far right in their politics as Dr. Levy or Rush Limbaugh- - without an awful lot of priming and brain washing.  Rush believes that you can write off the political center as irrelivent.  I disagree, as non affiliated voter numbers are growing.  More and more people don’t feel comfortable with either political party.  These people by in large did not express their opinion in 2010, but you can bet they’ll be there in 2012.  (Selah)

Randy Rhodes was upset as the proposed Republican changes to unemployment statutes.  They want to shorten the weeks to a maximum of 34 weeks.  They want drug testing for all the applicants even though studies in Florida, a particularly high drug usage state, indicate only one percent of the unemployed tested positive for drugs when they were doing the program before a Court stopped them.  They have to pay for their own drug tests which run $45.00 a month but if they don’t test positive they get their money back.  Of course how many Jewish elderly are there who eat poppy seed bagels, which could test positive.  The test has an anti marijuana bias because hard drugs such as meth and heroin clear out of your body in a few days, but marijuana can be detected in the body for a month, so you could be using it on vacation and still test positive.  They also insist that the unemployed have either a High School diploma, or else obtain their GED at their own expense.  Randy believes drug testing is counter productive and inefficient regardless.  Drug and insurance companies have banded together to require drug testing on even a white collar job as terms of coverage.  If an employee tests positive,  the employer is penalized with higher rates.  But as an incentive, to even DO drug tests will give you an initial discount on employer rates.  So the drug and insurance companies are working hand in glove because the drug companies are the ones that conduct the tests.

A couple of evenings ago I was listening to this debate between a Believer and an Atheist.  The Believer made three principal arguments as far as I could tell.  First of all he lays this scientific trip on us about advanced protein cells and all the laws of the universe and keeps asking “Why” this and “Why” that.  This is bogus on his part because the implication is we can find out all these “Why’s” if only we became Christians, and we can’t.  His second argument concerned “the lights going out in Europe” upon world war II and he brought up the old chestnuts of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.  The thing is that none of these may have even risen up weren’t it for the aftermath of World War I leaving a power vacuum in so many nations.  It was devout Christian leaders who started this war as heads of their mighty empires.  The Czar was a Christian and so was the King of England and I think Von Hindenburg was, too.  His third argument concerned this sense of existential loneliness we sometimes feel as human beings, as though these were not emotions we all have in common.  Elvis even sang a song on the Sun Sessions called “I’m in a crowd, but I’m all alone”.  I have felt “alone” at Church at Mark’s.  The other guy gets on and utterly demolishes the believer’s arguments.  He spoke of the political corruption of those who call themselves Believers and often miscarriages of criminal justice.  He also mentions that there is enormous waste in nature.  There are those millions of sperm cells that die upon every ejaculation.  They say that one star like our Sun burns out every few seconds in the universe but nobody cares because it isn’t us.  And he speaks of the death and cruelty in nature.  He says that 93% of the species of the world that once lived are extinct now.  I had no idea it was that high.  Of course there is the Marcus argument, to use my Blogger name, that often things are judged as “good” or “bad” by we humans, whose opinions utterly disregards anyhow.