Republicans want only the middle class and the working poor to sacrifice

The “shared sacrifice” new Gov. Rick “Chief Executive Outsourcer” Snyder talks about and budget cuts national Republicans want will only come from the middle class and the working poor.

National Republicans will continue the polices that are making the U.S. a banana republic and ushering in a new “Gilded Age,” and Snyder wants to kill the Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the most effective anti-poverty tool ever invented.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. In 1965 the average CEO was earning 24 times what the average worker was making. But by 2001 the C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 531 times as much as the average worker.

Despite that huge gap that continues to grow, Republicans forced an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest 2 percent in exchange for a 13-month extension of unemployment insurance benefits for people just trying to survive. That move will add more than $36 billon to the federal budget deficit.

In Michigan, while giving his cabinet large raises, Snyder proposed killing Michigan’s Earned Income Tax Credit for working people.

The Michigan EITC is a refundable tax credit given to working families. People apply for it when they fill out their state income tax forms. All families who are eligible for the federal credit are eligible for the state credit. The tax credit puts money into the pockets of hundreds of thousands of Michigan working families. The EITC brought $338 million into local communities throughout Michigan last year. That’s money spent directly into the local community on goods and services, not invested in offshore ventures.

“The Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit is a successful anti-poverty tool that helps low- and moderate-income families and small businesses in Michigan,” said Gilda Z. Jacobs, the President and CEO of the Michigan League for Human Services. “Eliminating this credit amounts to a tax increase on our most vulnerable families and will tax working people into poverty.”

The Michigan EITC is based on the federal EITC created by Republicans President Gerald Ford and expanded by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. In fact, patron saint Reagan called the EITC “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”

In Michigan, the EITC went into effect for Tax Year 2008, and, ironically, the bill creating it was sponsored by one of the most rightwing lawmakers, former Sen. Nancy Cassis, R-Novi.

“As this debate continues, let’s remember the faces of those in our economy who are helped by this tool: janitors, housekeepers, restaurant workers, daycare and home health aides, cashiers and retail clerks,” Jacobs said. “These are the very people who often are in charge of our loved ones, or who make our days easier.”

GWB is not the worst U.S. President in history; only the fifth worst

There is little doubt that George W. Bush was one of the worst U.S. Presidents in history. The only debate is whether he is actually the worst or just one of the worst, but the Siena College Research Institute’s (SRI) Survey of U.S. Presidents only puts Bush as the fifth worst U.S. President, ahead of such greats as Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, and Franklin Pierce.

The SRI has conducted the survey five times since 1982. More than 200 presidential scholars ranked the 43 U.S. Presidents on six personal attributes - background, imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck and willingness to take risks- five forms of ability - compromising, executive, leadership, communication and overall - and eight areas of accomplishment, including economic, other domestic affairs, working with Congress and their party, appointing supreme court justices and members of the executive branch, avoiding mistakes and foreign policy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt has been ranked No. 1 since the survey began, and this year the top five includes Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, in nearly 30 years, the same five presidents have occupied the first five places with only slight shuffling, despite decades of new research on former presidents and the accomplishments or lack thereof.

Bush had entered the survey at 23rd when the study was last conducted one year into his first term in 2002. Today, just one year after leaving office, Bush has sunk to the bottom five at 39th where he belongs. The survey found he rated especially poorly in handling the economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence.

Although it’s far too early to judge his Presidency, President Barack Obama was ranked as the 15th best President, earning high marks on imagination (6th), communication ability (7th) and intelligence (8th). However, he scored poorly on background, family, education and experience. While I can understand scholars rating him low on experience, I’m baffled at what is wrong with his background, family and education.

My Republican critics on the blog like to point to President Jimmy Carter as the worst president, and Carter is rated low at 32ns; dropping from 25th in 2002. However, as long as GWB is around, there is no danger that Carter will ever be ranked as the worst U.S. president.

GOP saint Ronald Reagan dropped two places from 16th overall in 2002 to 18th today, and that puts him behind Bill Clinton who basically switched places with Reagan, rising from 18th in 2002 to 13th.

Reagan to skip Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery

Reagan to skip Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Actually, I stole that headline from Michigan’s busiest rightwing blogger - “the Blogprof,” and I just substituted Reagan for Obama. Both headlines are accurate.

But the Republican noise machine has picked up on it to try and paint President Obama as anti-military. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

According to the AP, “The White House says Obama and his family will travel to their hometown on Thursday and stay through the weekend. It will be their first trip back home since a visit for Valentine's Day weekend in February 2009.
On Monday, Obama is scheduled to participate in a Memorial Day ceremony at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill.
In Obama's absence, Vice President Joe Biden will participate in the customary wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington.”

Wow. His first time home in 15 months. How many times were Presidents Reagan and Bush II at their ranches clearing brush? I guarantee they never stayed away for 15 months. But, the Republican noise machine ignores that fact to falsely attack the President, just like it ignored the fact that at least two other Republican Presidents had their Vice-President or a proxy lay the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

In 1983 Deputy Secretary of Defense W. Paul Thayer laid a wreath at Arlington Cemetery during the Memorial Day ceremony, according to a May 31, 1983, Washington Post article. The AP reported that President Reagan attended a "summit meeting in Williamsburg, Va., with leaders of the industrialized democracies.

Vice President Dan Quayle laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, according to a May 26, 1992, Boston Globe article. The Globe reported that President George H.W. Bush attended a wreath-laying ceremony and made brief remarks at an American Legion hall in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he also played a round of golf.

I guarantee this; Soldiers, Sailors and Marines killed in battle are not just buried at Arlington, and their ultimate sacrifice is just as great as those buried at Arlington.

Michael Reagan is the latest racist rightwing hatemonger to speak in Livingston County

Cleary University’s Economic Club Speakers Luncheon Series has brought in some of the most vile, racist rightwing tools to speak, and they did not disappoint with hatemonger Michael Reagan set to speak next month for a cool 20 grand plus expenses.

The stated mission of the series is to “enrich the Livingston County community by hosting speakers who can share a broad spectrum of social, political, intellectual and cultural experiences,” but the bigots they have brought in do nothing but bring the political discussion to the gutter. They are also almost all right-wingers. We have seen the likes of Ann Coulter, Steve Emerson and Dick Morris. Non-right-wingers have been few and far between.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards, will be a speaker on Oct. 7, but her appearance was timed more to embarrass her husband after the news of his infidelity broke.

Like Emerson - who is a self-proclaimed “terrorism expert” simply for narrating a Richard Mellon Scaife-funded documentary called “Jihad in America” - Reagan is making a name for himself and getting rich for his racist, anti-Arab views, and he is following the Coulter business model of the more outrageous things you say the more you are in demand in right wing circles and the more money you make.

We can expect that lack of diversity and divisiveness to continue at Cleary. The speakers the steering committee is seeking to appear in 2011 include former Republican Arkansas Governor and Faux “news“ host Mike Huckabee; conservative hatemonger and Ann Coulter wannabe Michelle Malkin and former Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn. The balance? U.S. Winter Olympians Apolo Ohno, Julia Mancuso and Hannah Kearney. Please.

Reagan has called one of Michigan’s most successful cites, Dearborn, “Dearbornistan.” The Livingston County Daily Press & Argus took the easy way out and called Reagan “a recognized conservative firebrand” instead of the bigot that he is.

Reagan told the paper that “ the highly Muslim-populated city of Dearborn is home to many people connected to the terrorist organization Hamas, as well as actual terrorists.” He went on to say that he has no proof, but that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

What is even funnier - but not as funny as Reagan’s take on Gov. Jennifer Granholm - is the comments of Cleary University President Tom Sullivan, who has to be the most misinformed person in the county. He claims, “he's never heard Reagan speak.” His comments were similar to what he said when the controversy over Coulter broke when he blamed bloggers for the community being upset and a board member resiging over the decision to pay her $30,000 to spread hate.

Sullivan said “he's not "particularly bothered" by Reagan's comments because the speaker series strives to attract diverse voices that engage thought on social, political and economic issues.” Aghain, what diversity?

Reagan’s take on the Michigan economy shows he is as misinformed as Sullivan. Reagan said the “country's economic downfall started in Michigan, and that the other 49 states followed suit and "became Michigan."
"You people elected the wrong governor. It's like, 'Why don't we get the captain of the Titanic to come back and sail ships across the ocean?' " Reagan said.

So, it was the Governor who stopped buying U.S. autos and sent two of the Big 3 into bankruptcy, and it was the Governor who caused the subprime mortgage crisis that almost killed the U.S. economic system and caused the worst recession since the Great Depression? Give me a break.

Not only is Reagan a bigot, he’s an idiot.

Reagan, 65, is the adopted son of conservative hero Ronald Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman. Reagan claims “his anti-tax message is rooted in his childhood, when his father told him he couldn't get a raise in his allowance until the former president got a cut in taxes.”

Wow. What a skin flint. That was when saint Ronnie was a liberal Democrat and the head of a labor union, and it was also the year he divorced his wife.

Guess the nuclear arms quote

It’s time to play guess the quote.

Who said this:

“There is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security, and that is to reduce the need for it. And this we are trying to do in negotiations with the Soviet Union. We are not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons. We seek, instead, to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.”

A) A bleeding heart, peacenik liberal?
B) Conservative saint Ronald Reagan in his Second Inaugural Address on January 21, 1985?
C) President Obama on the occasion of signing then biggest nuclear arms pact in a generation?

Surprisingly, the answer is B, and not C where President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday signed the first nuclear arms pact of its kind in two decades, but the answer is conservative saint Ronald Reagan. The pact signed Thursday will shrink the limit of nuclear warheads to 1,550 per country over seven years, but the good news is that it still allows for mutual destruction several times over.

So, it’s rather surprising that the President is being criticized for reaching the historic pact by conservatives from bloggers to the rightwing think tank the Heritage Foundation. One thing I have learned over the past year is that if President Obama brought about world peace, ended world hunger, helped find a cure for cancer and put a man on Mars Republicans would still find something to criticize him for.
One Michigan blogger is bemoaning the fact that this treaty reduces the ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) fleet. The treaty limits missile forces to 800 deployed and non-deployed intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, submarine launched ballistic missile launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons.

It has been 10 years since I retired from the Navy, but I’m surprised they still have SSBNs. They are a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.

The submarine’s only mission is to hide and launch its nuclear missiles when the end of the world is signaled. The submarine only surfaces long to replenish stores and change crews. It has a gold crew and blue crew that rotate every three months, but the sub is always deployed. I don’t know how much it cists to keep one deployed, but I know it’s not cheap.. How many times do we need to destroy the world?

The nine countries in the nuclear club that have nuclear weapons will, hopefully, never use them because of the mutual destruction concept, but a terrorist with a nuclear weapon will not hesitate to use it. That’s where our focus should be, and the more nuclear weapons there are, the higher the chance they will get their hands on one.

The American people wonder if right-wingers can get any more ridiculous

“And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it.”

Only in the world of conservatives, can those words President Obama will say in a nationwide speech to students tomorrow be considered propaganda and “imposing their political views on their children.” This is some of the silliness right-wingers are rolling out because the President of the United States is going to address students on the first day of school on the importance of education, staying in school, working hard and perseverance.

Here in conservative Livingston County, one Pinckney Community Schools parent, according to the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus, has threatened to blackmail the school district by “recruiting other parents to keep their children home on fall student count day if the district airs the speech.”

Each district receives a per-pupil foundation grant for each student counted that day that is the only money the school district receives to actually operate the school. Some idiot would sabotage the education of hundreds of other students just because of an 18-minute speech by the President they don’t like.

One Whitmore Lake parent said Obama’s speech “will attempt to force his views onto his children because he’s “a conservative and tends not to agree with Obama’s views.” “Maybe it’s innocent, but it doesn’t pass the smell test,” he added.

I agree; this ridiculous uproar does not pass the smell test.

The President released the text of the speech, and these are some of the views he is attempting to force on students.

“You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.”

How’s that for “socialist ideology?”

Here’s some more:

“My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.”

With a 50 percent divorce rate, I guarantee there are lots of students in Livingston County who live in households headed by a single parent. What an inspiring story the President has to tell; he came from humble beginnings to graduate from Harvard Law School to make history and become the first African-American President.

Where was the outcry when Republican presidents addressed students? Like when Reagan spoke to middle school students back in 1988 on the importance of tax cuts.

“The message at the Boston Tea Party -- have you studied yet in history about the Boston Tea Party, where because of a tax they went down and dumped the tea in the Harbor. Well, that was America's original tax revolt, and it was the fruits of our labor -- it belonged to us and not to the state. And that truth is fundamental to both liberty and prosperity.”

So much for this BS about respecting the office when we criticized Bush.

Bush is the Joe DiMaggio of vacationers

As you begin to get older, like I am - or you get past your 21st birthday - tearing off the days of your daily calendar get a little less fun, even if it’s a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit calendar. But my “Countdown to when Bush leaves Office” calendar offers me some small pleasure when ripping off the days.

The good new is there are only 201 days left until the national nightmare is over and Barrack Obama is sworn in as president. With just 201 days to endure, it got me to thinking about the Bush legacy. For that we have the worst attack on U.S. soil that occurred on his watch, Bush lied us into what will become the longest war/occupation in U.S. history, the person for planning the attack has not been brought to justice after almost seven years, the war in Afghanistan is falling apart, the economy is in sad shape, home values are plummeting, incomes are declining, home foreclosures are at an all-time historic high, the dollar is declining against all foreign currency, energy costs are skyrocketing and our national debt is skyrocketing. He has trashed the Constitution and our image and standing around the world has been badly tainted and we actually torture people.

But what Bush’s legacy, at better yet, the record, he will leave office with is what my daily calendar revealed today: Bush is the most vacationing president ever.

The record for most consecutive vacation days away from the White House was formally held by another president from the Grand Oil Party who had almost as much scandal as the Bush White House, Richard Nixon with 30 straight days. That record belonged to Bush just six months after taking office.

But Bush holds the all-time record for most total vacation days that may never be broken, and his record will most likely stand as long as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. The previous record was 335 days set by another Republican president, who was also the oldest U.S. president, Ronald Reagan. However it took eight years for Reagan to rack up that number, but Bush shattered the record in just four-and-a-half-years. According to the Washington Post, as of January 15, 2007, Bush has racked up a whopping total of 770 vacation days. He will continue to pad that record for another 201 days. When you compare that to the normal American worker, if they have any benefits left any more, who only gets 14 days a year, it’s obscene.

The good news is Bush will go on a permanent vacation in just 201 days.

New Livingston County GOP chair rolls out standard lame excuse for Republican loss of state House

Ronald Reagan's Morning in America also marked the awakening of Allan Filip's political consciousness.
Filip, 35, was just a boy growing up in Paw Paw during Reagan's 1980s heyday, but he felt a strong attraction to the president's message of optimism and hope.

So says Mr. Filip in a front-page feature story in the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus today. It’s a bit of a fluff piece, but that’s what the neighbors features were basically created for. Filip goes on to say, “There was kind of a defeatist attitude" in the country before Reagan came on the scene, Filip recalled. "He made me feel more secure, and he got me thinking more about being an American."

Filip apparently never heard of the Iran-Contra scandal or the 241 Marines who were killed in a terrorist bombing at the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks at the international airport in Beirut. The Marines were not even allowed to carry live ammo, and many Beirut veterans are still bitter because Reagan did not attend any of the memorial services or funeral for those killed in action, as well as the limited rules of engagement the Marines were operating under.

Filip said the reason that Democrats did so well in the November election — with
the exception of Livingston County — was that they were successful in nationalizing the election.
"People are not happy with the way Iraq has gone," he said.

He goes back on the same old excuse Republicans in Michigan have been trotting out since Nov. 7. I hope he honestly believes that, and I hope that’s the principal he operates under. It will ensure Democratic control of the Michigan House for some time. In the meantime, I would like Filip to show me one, just one, Michigan House or Senate candidate who ever mentioned the Iraq war as a campaign issue.

Often what’s left out in an article is what’s most telling. This is all the article says about Filip’s apparent brief stay in Washtenaw County.
While in Alabama — and later, when he moved to Washtenaw County — Filip lived in heavily Democratic areas. That, of course, ended when he came to Hartland Township in 2003. He served as vice chairman of the party for two years before taking over the top spot.

It never mentioned he ran for the Board of Commissioners in 2002 where he got walloped with just 29 percent of the vote. A year later he moved to heavily Republican Livingston County. I will stop short of calling him a carpetbagger who moved to Livingston County to run for political office because many people move to Livingston County for the open land and good schools, but Sterling Heights where he works for Vericorr may be a little closer to Ypsilanti where he moved from than Hartland.

Filip sounded like a practiced politician when asked about the possibility of running for office himself. He said he wouldn't rule anything out, although he has "no plans to do that now, with my family being young and bills to pay."