Barack Obama announced plans Friday to send $1.5 billion to Pakistan every year for the next five years, to build schools and roads and hospitals. That’s $7.5 billion dollars. As far, as we know, the Pakistanis haven’t rejected the funding.

Compare that to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Texas Governor  Rick Perry, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who are all Republicans and who all have announced plans to refuse Federal stimulus funding on grounds that there are strings attached. Sanford is rejecting $700 million, Palin is rejecting $288 million, Perry, $556 million, Barbour, $56 million, and Jindal, $98 million. That’s a total of almost $1.7 billion. (Perhaps we can just send it over to Pakistan as a sixth-year payment.)

It’s quite possible that at the end of the five years, the children of Pakistan will be more healthy and better-educated and have better prospects for the future than all the children in South Carolina, Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

From today’s New York Times’ editorial:

“It would be best, therefore, for Mr. Sanford to find a face-saving way to reverse himself. If he does not, voters should remember that their governor placed politics ahead of schoolchildren and the schools that are struggling to save them.”

Look at these facts:

“Number of South Carolina teachers that a state Republican official estimates will be laid off if the federal stimulus funds are declined: 4,000

Number by which the number of unemployed people grew each day in Louisiana in December: 430″

“Unemployment rate in some counties of Mississippi: 19%”

And then, consider this:

“Number of homeless children in the United States: 1.5 million

Percent of America’s identified homeless children that live in just 11 states: 75

Number of those states in the South: 9

Number of children homeless in Louisiana, the state with the highest percent rate of child homelessness in the nation: 204,053″

Heart-breaking, especially when you consider the role money plays in all of this, and that governors are turning millions of dollars away. Turning away money for schools and teachers and unemployment. Ironically, those 4000 teachers will most likely end up on… yes, that’s right, unemployment. It’s almost as if the governors want to keep their constituents uneducated, unemployed,  and hungry. And they’ll turn around come election time and say, “You think you’re poor now, wait until ‘Joe The Democrat’ becomes Governor and taxes you even more.” And the cycle continues into the next generation, and the next, and the next.

Governor Palin, in a nod to secessionists, said, we won’t “sell our birthright for short-term gain.” I suppose if greater unemployment, more people hungry and on welfare is their birthright, well, so be it.

Turns out, these governors will end up looking like asses, the children of their states will have less-prosperous futures, and be less-healthy and less prepared to know how to deal with all of the world’s additional challenges, all because these five governors have presidential aspirations, fear educated citizens, and just plain care more about an antiquated and erroneous interpretation of principle than the people they were elected to protect.

Calling Obama’s “the most fiscally irresponsible budget in American history,” Mike Pence promised a Republican alternative that would be ”leaner”, “with lower taxes, lower spending, and lower borrowing.” Introducing it as the “Republican Road to Recovery”, Whip Eric Cantor touted the GOP’s budget, stating it would “pull back to the middle” government spending. In advance of Thursday’s press conference, the GOP released this memo Wednesday:

“Given the President’s comments [Tuesday] night that, ‘we haven’t seen a budget out of [Republicans],’ we wanted to make sure to make you all aware [sic] that we are introducing our Republican Budget Alternative tomorrow.”

Saying, “We have a plan, yes, we have ideas”, Cantor took the opportunity yesterday, as they were about to unveil their budget, to further state that Republicans had alternative stimulus and housing plans, promising “we will have a healthcare plan, we will have an energy plan.”

Sounds like they’ve been hard at work. If they have, they haven’t any proof. Cantor, Pence, and Boehner have all been following the “less is more” paradigm. Their promises of delivering a “real budget” are campaign echoes of McCain promising to “find bin Laden” and “end the war in Iraq”. “I know how, my friends.” Cantor delivered an eighteen page budget. Eighteen pages. Some high school papers are longer. Not including footnotes. 

CNN reports:

“But, when pressed for the details on how the GOP plan differed from the President’s, Boehner acknowledged he didn’t have many. “This is a blueprint for where we’re going,” Boehner said.”

The White House’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs quipped, 

“It’s interesting to have a budget that doesn’t contain any numbers. I think the party of no has become the party of no new ideas.”

Speaking to NBC’s Mike Viqueira, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer displayed unusual ferocity:

“I am very frustrated Mike, because we were waiting for this, we cut away from the President to hear the big build-up. Republicans have a plan, they have ideas, they’re not the party of no and all I heard in that news conference was what they don’t like about the president’s plan.”

Brewer continued,

“We’ve heard them and today you get us all hyped up and you have our undivided attention and what happens when you get up and repeat the same criticism we’ve already heard. I didn’t hear ideas. I heard the promise of ideas, and we’re going to have more on x, y and z, but I didn’t hear the ideas.”

Time and again the Republicans have promised one thing and, unable to deliver, given us another. “Greeted as liberators!” “Compassionate Conservatism.” “Restore honor to the Oval Office.” “We do not torture.” ”We have a plan, yes, we have ideas.” The American people are tired of the false promises, tired of the “bait and switch”, and wise to the fact that there’s little thought behind all that exhaust.

Right now, the wise Republican would pick and choose his battles. Right now, the wise Republican would pull back, take some time to formulate a real plan, with real numbers, real goals, real ideas. Right now, the wise Republican would let the Democrats battle each other, then drive up, having mapped out a better budget. The problem is, the Republican Road to Recovery is an eighteen page program that leads right back to the distillery of dead-end ideas. The problem is, on a  Republican Road to Recovery, are there any wise Republicans left?

• The top two Senators with the most earmarks are Republicans (Cochran, Wicker).
• Of the top ten earmarkers five are Republicans.
• Louisiana and Mississipi (four Senators, three are Republicans) lead the pack with the most earmarks.

When will Americans realize the Republican Party is a party of disingenuous windbags that are unable to hold to any values except those that are harmful to this country or to the Democratic party?

(Sources: Taxpayers For Common Sense)

Much was made of Cheney’s group’s membership and activities, including the extreme secrecy surrounding it. An uproar over the taskforce led Congress to investigate and even file a lawsuit to gain more information, although their efforts were unsuccessful. The Washington Post reported,

“One of the first visitors, on Feb. 14 [2001], was James J. Rouse, then vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; a week later, longtime Bush supporter Kenneth L. Lay, then head of Enron Corp., came by for the first of two meetings. On March 5, some of the country’s biggest electric utilities, including Duke Energy and Constellation Energy Group, had an audience with the task force staff.”

“Jack N. Gerard, then with the National Mining Association, had a meeting with Lundquist and other [Energy Task Force] staffers in February. He urged the administration to give the Energy Department responsibility for promoting technology for easing global warming and to keep the issue away from the Environmental Protection Agency, which could issue regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. The administration adopted that position.”

With a administration run by former energy magnates, and advised by and outsourced to corporate America, it is both unsurprising and no coincidence that now, the economy is the worst it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, our dependence of foreign energy is at an all-time high, and efforts to fight global warming are all but non-existent. And it is somewhat ironic that today, the same day vice-president Biden announces the creation of his middle-class task force, his predecessor’s beneficiary, ExxonMobil, announces a full-year profit of $45.2 billion, setting a new company and U.S. record.

It took less than eight years for Bush administration policies and ideologies to destroy this nation economically, politically, and morally. President Obama and vice-president Biden have taken appropriate steps on numerous fronts to right the ship of state. It’s time the Right, which is locked in a deep battle for its identity and ideology today, open its eyes and recognize its policies are wrong, and realize it has wrecked America, wounded its people, and begin to apologize.

Speaking of The New York Times, and Mr. Krugman, his column appears on today’s Op-Ed page, across from William Kristol’s. Mr. Kristol’s column, entitled, Fire the Campaign, offers this observation:

“The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.”

He is, of course, correct. The McCain campaign, McCain himself, is a picture of erratic ignorance. Senator McCain is not an unintelligent man, but one who consistently makes poor and ill-informed, if not outright uninformed decisions. 

Kristol continues, essentially making the argument against McCain, and stating McCain

“…should tell the truth — we’re in uncharted waters, no one is certain what to do, and no one knows what the situation will be on Jan. 20, 2009. But what we do know is that we could use someone as president who’s shown in his career the kind of sound judgment and strong leadership we’ll need to make it through the crisis.”

As is often the case, Kristol is just wrong (as is evidenced here, here, especially here, and, oh heck, just look here), and now wrong in insisting “no one is certain what to do”. Read (now) Nobel-winning Paul Krugman’s piece, “Gordon Does Good“, in which he writes:

“…the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own.”

Right now, the DOW is up almost 600 points, following similar increases in European and Asian markets. The general consensus is that this weekend’s G7 meeting was sufficiently successful, and the huge infusion of capital is calming fears enough to give the markets some stability. Krugman continues:

“At a special European summit meeting on Sunday, the major economies of continental Europe in effect declared themselves ready to follow Britain’s lead, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into banks while guaranteeing their debts. And whaddya know, Mr. Paulson — after arguably wasting several precious weeks — has also reversed course, and now plans to buy equity stakes rather than bad mortgage securities (although he still seems to be moving with painful slowness).”

Once again, the Right (McCain) and its mired-in-the-mud proponents (Kristol) miss the point, which is this: it takes intelligent leaders who are willing to gather information and informed and intelligent advisors, (such as prime minister Gordon Brown, and as Senator Obama have done,) and consider other perspectives to move the ball forward. And it shouldn’t take a Nobel-winner to see this simple truth. Unfortunately, Senator McCain hasn’t, and most likely never will.

Three thousand six words that crescendoed with thirty four words that, much like the argument about last week’s $700+ billion bailout, was the “slam-dunk” argument convincing Americans that the risk of not going to war far outweighed the risk of going to war:

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

For many Americans, including myself, the image of a mushroom cloud, perhaps over my home in my beloved Manhattan, was far too compelling to ignore any longer. And Bush did succeed in taking us to war, through fear and intimidation, but with little facts, as it now appears he has succeeded in taking us to the cleaners, through fear and intimidation, but with little facts.

Though early in the race, we are already seeing signs of success similar to those we saw under his calamitous reign over the war: huge drops in the markets, worldwide, loss of confidence, worldwide, loss of personal net-worth, worldwide, loss of jobs, worldwide. Yesterday’s (albeit somewhat recovered but nevertheless historic) 800 point drop in the DOW, Russian markets having to close twice, even the fact that the second most-Googled term right now is “commercial paper”, leads anyone to believe that we are in for a long, cold winter, and unfortunately spring, summer, and fall.

No one is expecting any economy to recover in the near term. Bush’s fear mongering has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, although not in the form he predicted. He has been wrong on every count. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The markets essentially collapsed despite passage of the $700+ billion bailout bill. We learned Friday that another 159,000 jobs were lost in September, the ninth straight month of job losses, adding up to three quarters of a million lost jobs this year alone. Unemployment stands at a staggering 6.1%. On his Sunday talk show, John McLaughlin predicted next year unemployment will go over 11%. 

Have no doubt, Americans now have images of bread lines entering their heads. Right now, 60% of Americans “believe another economic depression is likely“. There is a huge rise in the use of the words “fear” and “panic” in the media. And for all this, we have Mr. Bush’s incompetence, ignorance, and lack of intelligence to blame. Right now, I pray for an “elite president”. 

By the way, President Bush had the audacity to quote John F. Kennedy in the very next sentence of his “Mushroom Cloud” speech.

As President Kennedy said in October of 1962: “Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small.

If only Bush had listened to the words he had repeated. Let me leave you, and President Bush, and Senator McCain with another quote from John F. Kennedy, from his inauguration in 1961:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

America’s Economic Crisis Is Merely A Symptom Of A Greatest Crisis To Come.

The Road To Civil War. Part One.

The House’s failure Monday to pass the historic federal bailout bill is a failure of our government to do its most essential job: protect the people it was elected to represent. This was not democracy in action. This was a concerted, organized revolt against a perceived bi-partisan success by a small group of truculent Republicans and yes, some Democrats as well, who were more concerned with public perception, and fear that a “yes” vote would mean losing their jobs, than with doing the people’s business in an effective, efficient, responsible, manner. No doubt, the job losses will come, not only for them, but for millions of Americans who will suffer because every branch of our society failed in its duty to understand and present properly the true facts of the proposed financial bill, and its impact on the American and world markets.

Despite its ineptitude, or perhaps because of it, Congress knows that 34 days before an election it cannot go on vacation, without a solution in place to the gravest financial, indeed, gravest crisis, period, we have seen since the Great Depression. The problem is that few in Congress understand this economic crisis. Granted, few, if any, anywhere, truly do. But, as Tom Friedman wrote in today’s New York Times,

“We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls.”

This is the crux of a larger issue: Our society has become too complex and out-of-control for anyone to understand what is holding it together and driving it. Worse, overall, Americans are becoming less, not more, intelligent and educated, “reading and understanding what they read less as well”. We have a sitting president and a current vice presidential candidate who clearly do not read newspapers. When asked in an interview with Katie Couric, which aired Monday, what sources she uses to keep herself up to date, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, could not name one newspaper or magazine or television news show she follows to “stay informed and to understand the world”.

Some Conservative Republicans are so in love with their faith that the bible, or their interpretation of the bible, has replaced the news for them. Republicans are so intent on allowing our children to wallow in religion that they want to dismantle the US Department of Education, teach Creationism in schools, and elect a president who had to get his father, an Admiral, to help him get into military college, where he subsequently graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. John McCain acknowledges this, and yet chose a vice-presidential candidate who took six years and five colleges to get her degree. Obviously, intelligence and education are not pre-requisites to the Republicans. Their response? The liberal, elite left and the liberal, elite media don’t love America. But whose America?