A Time for Change

CQ Politics has a rather interesting article about whether liberals can turn Rush Limbaugh into GOP Ammo.  David Corn suggests that Rush Limbaugh might become a liability for the incredibly shrinking Republican party.  Several progressive groups have joined forces to target certain Senators who have opposed the stimulus plan and Rush Limbaugh is the focus of that attack.  It is fitting, since after only days in office, Limbaugh is already blaming every economic failure on Barack Obama.  The commercial that is launched against the Senators says:

NARRATOR: Listen to what Rush Limbaugh said about President Obama’s Agenda and his Jobs Package.

LIMBAUGH: I HOPE HE FAILS!

NARRATOR: The Obama Jobs bill overwhelmingly passed the House…. But not one Republican voted yes. Every Republican member of the House chose to take Rush Limbaugh’s advice. Every Republican voted with Limbaugh….and against creating 4 million new American jobs.

We can understand why an extreme partisan like Rush Limbaugh wants President Obama’s Jobs program to fail….but the Members of Congress elected to represent the citizens in their districts?… That’s another matter. Now the Obama plan goes to the Senate….And the question is: Will our Senator, _____ , side with Rush Limbaugh too.

LIMBAUGH: I HOPE HE FAILS!

NARRATOR: Or will he reject the partisanship and failed economic policies of the past, and stand up for the people of _____. Call Senator_____ now at 202 224 3121….. tell him he represents you… not Rush Limbaugh.

Congratulations to these groups for calling Rush out for who he is.  He is laughing all the way to the bank while launching the same kind of attack that he made against President Clinton, and if he doesn’t have any facts to support something he says, he just makes it up.  His interests are not in ensuring that the country flourishes, his interests are in making sure that people are listening to his talk show.  These Senators should be called out.  

The shift inpolitics has left many republicans behind with certain notable exceptions. Last fall, Colin Powell repudiated Rush Limbaugh and the divisiveness that he churns to increase his ratings when he endorsed Barack Obama.  Huffington Post reports that Democrat Alan Grayson of Florida stated “Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.”  The conservative Bill Bennett also repudiated Rush Limbaugh, “”the locution ‘I want him to fail’ is not what you say the first week the man’s been inaugurated.”  Many have questioned his patriotism and suggested that he is un-American.  I say he’s just greedy.

Does the American electorate want its public policy and legislation dictated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh?  Given the incredibly shrinking Republican base, that would be a resounding, “NO.”  As Nate Silver said in reporting that there was not one single vote for the stimulus plan:

[The Republicans'] unanimous opposition reads as an emphatic rejection of the President and the President’s attempts at “bipartisanship”. And the President is very popular right now.

But – the base is happy, or at least reasonably so. Rush Limbaugh will be singing John Boehner’s praises tomorrow. I’m just not sure what message this sends to the other 78 percent of the country.

It is also an enormous risk that they are not voting for an economic stimulus that will not only provide jobs, but extend unemployment benefits to those who need it most.  Just as I am sure that the workers in the Midwest will remember that the Republicans held them out to dry when they refused to vote for a bailout for the automakers, I am quite certain that Americans will remmebr the Republicans each and every time they just say “NO” to any kind of assistance to the American worker during this economic crisis.

Which brings me to my next point,  that sort of divisiveness may have worked 20 years ago against President Clinton to an extent, but things are different now. The electorate is different and the dynamic of the country has changed. Please listen to Limbaugh’s comments about our new President. 

Limbaugh’s racist rant includes President Obama

Limbaugh’s agenda is to do whatever he can do undermine anything that President Obama tries to do, which is clear if you hear his show or read the transcripts of it.  He can’t mask his racism.  And these are not the only racist remarks he’s made.  News One put together a list of the Top 10 racist quotes from old Rush, which you can find here, but here are a few that really shocked me:

1. I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

2. You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.

6. The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.

7. They’re 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?

8. Take that bone out of your nose and call me back(to an African American female caller).

10. Limbaugh attacks on Obama. Limbaugh has called Obama a ‘halfrican American’ has said that Obama was not black but Arab because Kenya is an Arab region, even though Arabs are less than one percent of Kenya. Since mainstream America has become more accepting of African-Americans, Limbaugh has decided to play against its new racial fears, Arabs and Muslims. Despite the fact Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law school, Limbaugh has called him an ‘affirmative action candidate.’ Limbaugh even has repeatedly played a song on his radio show ‘Barack the Magic Negro’ using an antiquated Jim Crow era term for black a man who many Americans are supporting for president. Way to go Rush.

I hesitate to call anyone un-American and I really do think he does what he does because he’s greedy, but a man who routinely talks about women pursuing equal pay and other rights as “feminazis” and spews the racial slurs above, that’s really him.  It;s the essence of him too.

If any of you have ever seen the movie Swamp Thing, whoever drank a certain potion during the movie became more of whatever they really are.  In some cases it was a monster, and in others it was a Swamp Thing.  In Rush Limbaugh’s case, it would be a mirror image of everything that is negative in our history from the murder of 4 little African American girls during the civil rights struggle, cowardly men in sheets, all of the  men who have held women back in their careers and paid them less and so much more.

A person like Rush Limbaugh is not about fixing things or moving the country in a positive direction to become better than we have been, he is all about the status quo.  It is his primary job to make sure that we are brought  back to the good old days of slavery, segregation and women not having any rights.  

Is that the America that we want?  Is that he best that we can be?  

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If I were Rush, I’d listen

Michael Steele

Mother Jones has exposed Michael Steele for the hypocrite that he is.  On one hand, he speaks of Barack Obama as solely a “media creation”:  ”If he wins, he’s a media creation, he’s a brand. America doesn’t need a president who’s a brand. America needs a president who can lead”  or “I think some of it has to do with a level of white liberal guilt.”  Then on another occasion he claims pride in the election of President Obama:  ”I’m very proud to see Barack Obama do what Barack Obama has done and is doing. ”

Will the real Micheal Steele please stand up?

Sarah Palin has food and heat, but her constituents are hungry and cold

The Sarah Palin  Truth Squad has an excellent post about Sarah Palin’s negligence as a Governor while she is out of the state on her never-ending self-promotion tour, “All about Sarah Palin, All of the Time.”  Her constituents are cold and hungry while she gets treated to cocktails and dinners in Washington, D.C.  Please read the post.  This is tragic.  It really is Palin’s Katrina except she hasn’t even flown a plane over to look at Emmonak from afar.  She just doesn’t even care that much .

Sarah Plain Truth Squad.  You can also see it in Huffington Post.

It is written by the author of The Mudflats.

I am including a link to this very interesting program with the host Amy Goodman.  This particular show provides headline news and deals with the hot topic of the politicizing of the Department of Justice, which, as a lawyer I find deplorable, and has one of the victims of the politics of the Department of Justice Bush political machine where democrats and really anyone left of ultra conservative was targeted.

It is an excellent program.  I hope you have the chance to see it here.

I recently posted about a very nasty mass murder in Miami and stated that I think there should be an assault gun ban.  Due to a personal experience and my own personal beliefs, I was expressing my opinion. I think too many lives are lost due to guns each year and the line must be drawn and loopholes in gun laws closed.  Along came someone named “Demensio” who takes comments to the length of harassment due to length and frequency, along with a bevy of his NRA- frat brothers and sisters. Some were rude on my blog, others less so, but they never revealed that they NRA shills and that they blog to promote NRA  gun propaganda.  In fact, most use phony email addresses when they leave comments. However, I received a pingback about a post on one of their blogs about my post and comments:

So, here’s some background: I was over at a blog, commenting on another “ban assault weapons” post. There was some good back and forth, the pro-ban crowd was represented by the blog’s writer, Catherine, and to some extent Skyewriter.

COMMENTS:

Mike W. said…

wow that woman was delusional (the author of the original blog post.)      

I can’t help but feel sorry for folks like that.

January 30, 2009 10:35 AM

Rustmeister said…

Yeah, she was one step away from fingers in ears, lalalala      

Ya know what I mean. =)

 

 This is their banner.  

I do not belong to any such “propaganda” group for gun control advocates. Apparently, if someone has a different opinion, they are “delusional.”  Well, I am a lawyer, with over a quarter of a century of education at some very good schools.  I make a good living and do the things I am supposed to do as a member of society, including contributing through charitable works.  I am certainly not delusional.

I suppose the hard core gun right wingnuts think I am because I never bought their ludicrous argument that the Second Amendment is intended to allow people to overthrow the government if the government gets out of line.  Well, Timothy McVeigh, here we come.  And they say that I am delusional?  LOL!

For those who are interested, that is not what the Second Amendment was intended to do.  I cite below text from the Brady website interpreting the second Amendment as I did in my replies to their comments on my blog:

The concept of a “well regulated Militia” is somewhat foreign to 20th century America, but it is central to the meaning of the Second Amendment.

At the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted, each of the states had its own “militia” — a military force comprised of ordinary citizens serving as part-time soldiers. Most of the adult male population was required by state law to enlist in the militia. The militia was “well regulated” in the sense that its members were subject to various legal requirements. They were, for example, required to report for training several days a year, to supply their own equipment for militia use, including guns and horses, and sometimes to engage in military exercises away from home.

The purpose of the militia was expressed in the Second Amendment — to assure “the security of a free State” — against threats from without (e.g. invasions) and threats from within (e.g. rebellions, riots, etc.).

The “militia” was not, as some gun control opponents have claimed, simply another word for the armed citizenry. It was an organized military force, “well regulated” by the state governments. Noah Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 defines “militia” as: “…the able bodied men organized into companies, regiments and brigades, with officers of all grades, and required by law to attend military exercises on certain days only, but at other times left to pursue their usual occupations.”

When the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification in 1787, the continued viability of the state militia was a central issue. The new Constitution established a permanent army composed of professional soldiers and controlled by the federal government. The “Anti-Federalists,” who sought changes in the newly proposed Constitution, were fearful of the federal standing army authorized by the Constitution. The use of troops by George III as an instrument of oppression was still fresh in their memories.

The Anti-Federalists saw the state militia as an effective counterpoint to the power of the standing army but they were concerned that the federal government had excessive power over the militia. They argued that the Constitution left the arming of the state militia exclusively to the federal government. During the Virginia ratification debates, Patrick Henry asked: “When this power is given to Congress without limits or boundary, how will your militia be armed?”

The Second Amendment was written in response to this Anti-Federalist concern. The Amendment affirms that the keeping and bearing of arms in a “well regulated Militia” of the states is a “right of the people,” not dependent on the whim of the federal government. The original intent of the Second Amendment, therefore, was to prevent the federal government from passing laws that would disarm the state militia.

The Second Amendment in the Twentieth Century

The Second Amendment has become an anachronism, largely because of drastic changes in the militia it was designed to protect. We no longer have a citizen militia in which a large portion of the population is enrolled for part-time military service and required by the government to maintain private arms for such service. As the nation grew, it became unworkable and unduly expensive for the states to impose military training and service on that many Americans.

The modern “well regulated Militia” is the National Guard — a state-organized military force of ordinary citizens serving as part-time soldiers, like the early state militia. However, unlike the early militia, the National Guard is of more limited membership and depends on government-supplied — not privately owned — arms. Whereas in 1787 federal restrictions on privately owned guns may have interfered with the “well regulated Militia,” this is not the case today. Gun control laws have no effect on the arming of today’s militia, since those laws invariably exempt the National Guard. Therefore, they raise no serious Second Amendment issue.

“The purpose of the Second Amendment is to restrain the federal government
from regulating the possession of arms where such regulation would
interfere with the preservation or efficiency of the militia.”

U.S. v. Hale, 978 F.2d 1016 (8th Cir. 1992)

The Second Amendment in the Courts

As a matter of law, the meaning of the Second Amendment has been settled since the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). In that case, the High Court wrote that the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was “to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness” of the state militia. The Court added that the Amendment “must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Since Miller, the Supreme Court has addressed the Second Amendment in two cases. In Burton v. Sills, 394 U.S. 812 (1969), the Court dismissed the appeal of a state court ruling upholding New Jersey’s strict gun control law, finding the appeal failed to present a “substantial federal question.” And in Lewis v. United States, 445 U.S. 55 (1980), the Court upheld the federal law banning felons from possessing guns. The Court found no “constitutionally protected liberties” infringed by the federal law.

In addition, in Maryland v. United States, 381 U.S. 41 (1965) and Perpich v. Department of Defense, 496 U.S. 334 (1990), cases not involving the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has affirmed that today’s militia is the National Guard.

Since Miller was decided, lower federal and state courts have addressed the meaning of the Second Amendment in more than thirty cases. In every case, the courts have decided that the Amendment guarantees a right to be armed only in connection with service in a “well regulated Militia.” The courts unanimously have rejected the NRA’s view that the Second Amendment is about the self-defense or sporting uses of guns. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit wrote, the courts “have analyzed the Second Amendment purely in terms of protecting state militias, rather than individual rights.” United States v. Nelson, 859 F.2d 1318 (1988).

The Second Amendment and the Gun Control Debate

The National Rifle Association spends millions of dollars every year to foster its myth that the Second Amendment guarantees a broad, individual right to be armed that precludes virtually every restriction on private ownership of guns. The gun lobby’s efforts have had a profound influence on the gun control debate. Public opinion polls show that, although more than 60% of Americans erroneously believe that the Constitution gives them a right to be armed, only a minority of Americans believe that it should grant that right. It is time for the American people to know the truth about the Second Amendment and for the NRA’s systematic distortion of our Constitution to stop.

As Former Harvard Law School Dean Erwin Griswold put it, “to assert that the Constitution is a barrier to reasonable gun laws, in the face of the unanimous judgment of the federal courts to the contrary, exceeds the limits of principled advocacy. It is time for the NRA and its followers in Congress to stop trying to twist the Second Amendment from a reasoned (if antiquated) empowerment for a militia into a bulletproof personal right for anyone to wield deadly weaponry beyond legislative control.”

Now they want you to believe that they need to cling to high powered military-style rifles so that they can protect this country from an evil government that they may need to overthrow?  

Bellevue anyone?  

No wonder the NRA is getting its butt kicked in court and in the court of public opinion.  People don’t want anymore of these private militias ala Waco ( or Whacko as I call it).

On another post on the NRA shill’s blog I found the following which is intended to advocate on behalf of gun owners.  It is completely disingenuous and not well founded in fact, but it is telling.

Well, by now you’ve seen it. The part that was first noticed on Obama’s website has moved, part & parcel, to Whitehouse.gov (emphasis mine)

Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.

So, how do we get the message out? How can we get people to realize they’ve been hoodwinked (bamboozled!) on this issue? I was meditating on this very issue this morning, and this is what I’ve come up with.

First, the “don’t” list:

1. Don’t start out by telling them they are stupid. That includes phrases like “Do you know what an “assault weapon” is?”  (Don’t say they are stupid, just go back on your blog and say when you think that they don’t know about it or laugh at them behind their back after you talk to them at how stupid they really are).
2. Don’t get technical. Don’t even get into the difference between automatic and semi-automatic. They don’t care.
3. Don’t start out by claiming the politicians are lying. They are, but saying so isn’t a good way to start.
4. Don’t, please for the love of all that is good in the world, don’t tell them the Second Amendment was written so we could oppose our government once it became corrupt. No matter how true it is, don’t say that. They’ll think you’re nuts.

As to number 4, yes, I think they’re nuts and they know not what the Second Amendment is all about.

There is a wnderful article by Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine about one of my all time favorite lawyers <she said dripping with sarcasm>.  He is one of the architects of the use of torture against detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere by delivering the legal opinions that the Bush Administration could hide behind to carry out its war crimes.  In other words, her was just another neo-con Justice department shill for torture.   Scott Horton describer Yoo as “the indefatigable advocate of crushing the testicles of small children to extract actionable intelligence.”  He was the chief officer of the memos that Bush relied on to torture.  Now that’s a real resume stuffer.

Before I get to the article, I want to give some details of the effects of these opinions.  Many, many Americans believe that Bush only used these tactics with “bad guys,” whatever that means, and there is a group of conservative Americans that say, I’m OK with that because I want to be safe.  It is important to know how far this went and how abusive it was.  Imagine that any of these things happened to you, your son or your daughter.  It takes on different meaning when you attach a real life and not as the article says a nameless, faceless “boogeyman.”

Politico recently discussed that the same Department of Justice that Bush politicized, i.e., he fired career lawyers in a department that was supposedly apolitical so that he could use the equivalent of your county prosecutor or state attorney for his political agenda.  I hope I need not describe to you how dangerous that is and that is the very reason that our founding fathers fought to establish this country to be free of that kind of persecution for political and/or religious beliefs.

These department of Justice lawyers will be asking to throw out a lawsuit where a New York man was held against his will, without charges being brought, on US Soil, on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda operative planning to set off a dirty bomb.  

The suit contends that Yoo’s legal opinions authorized Bush to order Padilla’s detention in a Navy brig in South Carolina and encouraged military officials to subject Padilla to aggressive interrogation techniques, including death threats and long-term sensory deprivation. 

That’s not all. On Thursday, Justice Department lawyers are slated to be in Charleston, S.C., to ask a federal magistrate there to dismiss another lawsuit charging about a dozen current and former government officials with violating Padilla’s rights in connection with his unusual detention on U.S. soil, without charges or a trial. 

The defendants in that case are like a who’s who of Bush administration boogeymen to Obama’s liberal followers — former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. 

The two cases raise the question of how aggressively the Obama administration intends to defend alleged legal excesses of the Bush administration in the war on terror. The Supreme Court recently gave the new president until March to decide whether to defend the detention without trial of another man held as an enemy combatant, Ali Saleh Al-Marri.

Padilla is represented by lawyers from Yale law school’s human rights clinic.  Yoo is represented by people who have publicly criticized him.

Obama’s appointee for attorney general, Eric Holder, has taken issue with some of Yoo’s conclusions but does not appear to have singled him out by name. “I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture,” Holder said in a speech last year, alluding to a 2002 memo Yoo wrote.

Holder said the Bush administration was “wrong” when it “authorized the use of torture,” when it “secretly detained Americans without due process” and for violating the Constitution, though he said he did not take issue with the “motives” of those who helped set the policies. 

Other Obama Justice Department appointees have been far more strident in their criticism of Yoo. In an article in Slate just last year, Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen of Indiana University, called one of Yoo’s memos “plainly flawed” and his defense of it “irresponsibly and dangerously false.” 

Johnsen was so vocal in her criticism of Yoo that a liberal magazine, Mother Jones, branded her the “anti-Yoo.” 

Politico quotes an ethics expert who rightly says that independent legal counsel should be appointed so that Yoo will get fair and full representation.

I am thrilled that the Harper’s article notes that there is a pending Justice Department investigation instituted by the office of Professional responsibility (ethics) to analyze “serious ethical issues surrounding the issuance of Yoo’s legal opinions.:  And there’s more:

But the OPR probe is far from Yoo’s only or even most pressing worry. The likelihood that he will face a criminal probe and then possibly prosecution is growing. Susan J. Crawford, the Cheney protege tapped as the senior Bush Administration official to oversee the Guantánamo military commissions, publicly admitted in an interview with Bob Woodward, that at least one of the detainees had been tortured through the application of an interrogation regime that had been approved by the White House. In their exit interviews, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were emphatic that in authorizing torture, they relied on the advice of their lawyers, meaning John Yoo. But in the ultimate act of ingratitude, Bush left office without issuing the anticipated blanket pardons to his torture team. NATO allies and United Nations officials are reminding the new Obama Administration that it has a solemn obligation under article 4 of the Convention Against Torture to begin a criminal investigation into how the United States came to use torture as a matter of official policy. And public opinion has changed, with a clear majority of Americans now favoring a probe into the Bush Administration’s use of torture techniques.

If you want to see the Yoo torture memo, you can see it here.  I am not sure non-lawyers will understand how ridiculous this memo is.  He deserves to be prosecuted.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal,  Yoo is railing against President Obama for signing an executive order repudiating torture.  This is apparently his defense.   The memo is so poorly analyzed that if my first year associate gave it to me I would reject it.  A defense of this memo will be difficult for someone of his background.  He clearly knows better.  As Scott Horton said,

 Obama, Yoo says, has put the safety of Americans on the line: his torture ban will “seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks.” Never mind, of course, that no evidence has been advanced of a single instance in which the use of torture produced intelligence that prevented a future terrorist technique, while detailed and specific evidence has now been put forward that torture produced bad intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. 

We’ll just have to see what the Obama adminsitration handles this political football.  Will Obama do the right thing, and let his prosecutor loose to examine whether they broke the law so that politicians are held to the same rule of law as regular citizens or will they simply let it go.

 This will not be the adminsitration of either hope or change if they let it go.

I’d laugh if it were not so pathetic.  Rudy Giulani actually had the audacity to say that the $18 billion in bonuses that Wall Street  received after getting massive bailout from taxpayers are good for the econonmy.

“If you somehow take that bonus out of the economy, it really will create unemployment,” he said on CNN’s “American Morning.It means less spending in restaurants, less spending in department stores, so everything has an impact.”

Haven’t we learned that trickle down does not work by now, especially when it comes to trickling down with our own money.  The insanity of his comments cannot be underscored enough.  Why not just give the money directly to the people who need it and leave Wall Street out of it, but that would never cross his mind.

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Mitch McConnell

The Republican National Committee has gathered in Washington for a meeting to elect a new Chairman.  Yesterday Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, had some pretty telling things to say about the state of his party.  CNN reports that Senator McConnell said:

“We’re all concerned about the fact that the very wealthy and the very poor, the most and least educated, and a majority of minority voters, seem to have more or less stopped paying attention to us.”

“And we should be concerned that, as a result of all this, the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one.

“In politics there’s a name for a regional party, it’s called a minority party.”

“My concern is that unless we do something to adapt, our status as a minority party may become too pronounced for an easy recovery.”

But Senator McConnell’s words are just that, words.  This is the man who lead his party not to enact new legislation that woul assist illegal immigrants to become legal.  He is also the one who lead the charge to deny bailout money to the US automakers which would have put millions of hardworking Americans out of a job before Christmas because the Republicans wanted to pay back the UAW for its support of President Obama.  These are just two examples of the message they the Republicans are sending to the electorate and it is not a good one.

They will be even further marginalized if they are seen, as they have been so far, as the party of  ”no.”   If they exist solely to stand in the way of an economic recovery without offering bona fide new ideas on how to confront 21st century ideas, they are only a problem and not part of the solution.

In addition to having a bankruptcy of ideas, the party is choked by the Christian right.  The you are with us or you are against us crowd.  Liberals are idiots and un-American bunch. This small base that the party clings to is driving people away.  The party’s failure to see this is one of it’s greatest failures.   

Stephen Colbert is very funny in this video, but I am not sure if George Bush knew that most of us really wanted to say things like this to him, but get real answers.  

The Gross Domestic, i.e., the output of goods and services produced by labor and property in the US,  product is the leading indicator of the health of the economy.  While this shows a huge economic slow down, but it was not as bad as expected.  It was expected to be 5%.  At least there is some good news….

The Center for American Progress is examining the stimulus plan passed by the House and proposed by President Obama.  I prefer to read about this myself rather than have a reporter give me a 30 second sound bite.  for those of you who are interested in how Congress is seeking to spend our money, you may want to read the series.  Here is the one on education.  I would be interested to know what teachers think about it.

The above Barack Obama rant against Wall Street after he read a New York Times article about Wall Street executives who had given themselves almost $20 billion in bonuses in 2008, the same amount they received collectively during the much more bullish 2004. The article was based on a report by the New York state comptroller’s office that said last year’s total of Wall Street bonuses was the sixth-highest ever, despite the poor economic performance of the firms.  Now in breaking news on CNN, President Obama is in the process of revealing a major financial reform package and a crackdown on this conduct.

What is Wall Street thinking?  During an economic crisis where they have to ask taxpayers for money to keep their companies from going under, they give out billions in bonuses?  The Americans who are funding their companies are not getting bonuses due to the problem that they created.  I am thrilled that the President commented publicly, calling the bonuses “shameful.”  I applaud him for stating that this conduct clearly indicates a lack of responsibility.  i am even happier that he is actually doing something about it.

“There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses,” the clearly irritated president said. “Now’s not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them.”

President Obama had already been critical of executives who take big bonuses and companies that make big purchases. Last week, he directed Timothy Geithner to call Citigroup to express the administration’s displeasure at the struggling company’s impending purchase of a $50 million jet.  the jet purchase was subsequently cancelled.  Bravo.

This is not the face of terror, it is Nafees Syed, a Muslim who is attending Harvard

I think it’s funny that right wingnut blogs and organizations continue to refer to President Obama as a “Muslim.”  The usual response is the knee jerk reaction, “no he’s not,” but the better reaction is probably nothing at this point.   Most rational people by now know that he is a practicing Christian and you will not change the minds of the people who continually call him a Muslim.  They do so because they somehow feel that is a bad thing, but it’s not.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a Muslim, it’s the terrorists that we have issues with and not every Muslim is a terrorist.  

A lot fo people reading this blog probably don’t remember that Americans were fearful of not only the Japanese after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, they were afraid of Japanese-Americans.  During World War II we actually interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in camps surrounded by barbed wire and according to a PBS documentary over half were children.  The documentary is called, “Children of the Camps.”  Growing up, I always thought that we had come along way from that and we have, but after 9/11 there is a certain segment of the American population that assume that all Muslims identify and support Osama bin Laden’s bitterness and destructive jihad against the United States.  Most Muslims, in fact, do not.

The fact that President Obama has family members who are Muslim may actually help the United States open a dialogue with that part of the world after George Bush not only slammed the door in their faces, but nailed it shut.  So instead of acting like its a bad thig, I say, so what?  I hope that the President can use that to build a bridge with the Muslim world because I want to peacefully inhabit the world with our Muslim brothers and sisters.  I am not interested in attempting to reinvent the world in the American image. The world is a better place because we are diverse.

According to Nafees Syed, Muslim’s welcome the message that President Obama is sending.  Respect.  I applaud him for using that word so many times in his interview with Al Arabiya the other day because all too often our foreign policy has not always reflected the attitude that most Americans have toward Muslims and we have no reason not to respect the average peace loving Muslim citizen.

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