So where do you stand...on the THIRD paragraph?

So it's all Grover Norquist's fault. Democrats and the media are singing in unison that the reason Congress's antideficit super committee has failed is because of the conservative activist's magical antitax spell over Republicans.


Not to enhance this Beltway fable, but thank you, Mr. Norquist. By reminding Republicans of their antitax promises, he has helped to expose the real reason for the super committee's failure: the two parties disagree profoundly on a vision of government.

Democrats don't believe they need to do more than tinker around the edges of the entitlement state while raising taxes on the rich. Republicans think the growth of government is unsustainable and can't be financed no matter how much taxes are raised.

REAL CLASS WARFARE

Jim, here is class warfare
Attacking unions which is the core of the middle class, is class warfare.
Politicians with quality health care unavailable to common citizens is class warfare.
Congressman Ryan's plan to cut back social security, medicare is class warfare.
Laws that enable wealthy Americans to become more wealthy while many sink into poverty is class warfare.
Signing a pledge to NEVER RAISE taxes no matter what the consequences is stupidity.

Most Americans Jim don't want to be rich, they just want a full time job with basic health care, keep a roof over their head at affordable costs, food on their table that's safe, a chance to send their kids to college.
It's difficult to fathom for the millionaire's and billionaires in Congress ( 11% of the 1%) to see the despair in middle class America. But hopefully they will see the light in the next election.

Congress approval rating is what?

The top 1% of Americans possess a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90% !!!!
But yet let's not tax these job makers, because they create wealth, on it's face that doesn't make sense. They got the Busch tax cuts in a way promising more jobs, that did not happen. As Baxter says it doesn't matter what the taxes are Jim will complain they are too high. It would be easier to explain this gulf between the haves and have nots if it was intelligence, but the reality is it is about generational wealth accumulation. It's about mergers, that do not benefit anyone but the shareholders, certainly not the customer. It's about financial instruments that produce nothing but roving casino's. It's about laws so poorly written, that financial institutions, can run around them like stone statues.
We can't solve the inequality unless we give the poor and working class kids in this country a better educational opportunity, and show them that education is the way out of poverty. That means better schools, better books, better teachers, better computers, who is going to do that?
The job creators who are in a race to the bottom on wages for American workers?
Can't this Congress at least agree on this, we need better schools, higher wages to attract teachers. That's what we would do to attract business's. The approval rating for Congress is about 9%, I would want to pass something that shows they care about working Americans

Economics and Morality

Economics is premised on the assumption that people will act solely on their best interest. Morality is premised on individuals will act on another's best interest and benefit.

Capitalism works best when there is morality and sense of fairness among all. The reluctance of the top 1% to shoulder any significant burden in this country's effort to rebuild the economy and put people back to work is sickining. It is this display of indifference by the Republican's and the tea party that has ignited the country. Hence the morality issue, It's all about me. My taxes, My Wealth, My Way, it's not my fault your not rich, it's yours.

The responsibility to help rebuild the middle class, put people to work, is not my responsibility. Social morality exists no more in this 1% of the population.

In 1982 when the nation's unemployed was 11% where were the protesters then Jim? They were not there because they understood it was a shared experience and the gap between rich and middle class was a lot less.
Christianity which is the religion of choice of the Tea party (85%) seems to go out the window along with social morality (helping others).
The Tea Party is made up of working people, who see no others except themselves in the mirror. SAD! REALLY!

Various.

Yes...Ohio rejected removing government workers from collective bargaining rights.  OK, so Ohio is broke and going to get broker.  What cha going to do now Ohio?  Let's see how this gets played by the Conservatives after the upcoming tax increases:

Oh and....

Of all the noise of this week's state election results, what mattered most for Election 2012 came out of Virginia. It was the sound of the air leaking out of the Plouffe plan.


That would be David Plouffe, President Obama's former campaign manager and current senior strategist, who is focused today on how to cobble together 270 electoral votes for re-election. That's proving tough, what with the economy hurting Mr. Obama in states like Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania that he won in 2008. The White House's response has been to pin its hopes on a more roundabout path to electoral victory, one based on the Southern and Western states Mr. Obama also claimed in 2008.

Democrats were trounced in Tuesday's state legislature election, despite the president's heavy investment of time in the state.

States like Virginia. Mr. Obama was the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964; he beat John McCain by seven percentage points; and he did so on the strength of his appeal to Northern Virginia's many white-collar independents. Along with victories in North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, the Obama Old Dominion win in 2008 inspired a flurry of stories about how Democrats had forever altered the political map.

So the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state's former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats' "New Dominion." The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday's election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.  Let's just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.

Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices—including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell—in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year's midterms.

But then...The Az Republic never failing to misread the obvious.

Last week, voters nationwide said no to the right-wing efforts of some state political leaders.
Those in west Mesa's Legislative District 18 ousted one of Arizona's most powerful conservatives, partly because of his focus on illegal-immigration enforcement. Phoenix and Tucson elected Democratic mayors.  In other states, voters overturned legislation that would have restricted unions and also rejected a ballot measure to ban all abortions.

The outcomes of these elections have politicians and analysts wondering whether the nation is moving left.

Lastly:...

I had cynically assumed that the superfriends would address America's imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform — such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.


But I underestimated the genius of the superfriends' supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it. As the Hill reported:

"Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by the Hill."

Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you: "The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office."

Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade's worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama's 2009 stimulus bill.

But, aside from that, in what sense are these "savings"? The Iraq War is ended — or, at any rate "ended" at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure "savings" in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier?

And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn't it? And it wouldn't cost us anything because it would all be "savings."

Fight On, State!

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/11/10/should-penn-state-cancel-its-season

When this stuff happens, it scares me for the game. In the ivory towers of academia there are those who do not like football as it is and would like to see their schools go the way of the Ivy League or worse, the University of Chicago. That isn't imminent, but I hate to give such folks a piece of the sweater to pull on.

It should be pointed out that Paterno & McQueary both followed the letter of the law. Any punishment they receive (and I am glad they were fired) will be for not going above and beyond the requirements of the law. We agree that they had a moral duty to do so, but lets address laws if needed rather than further damaging a program that will be paying for this over and over - on and off the field - for years. Apart from the perpetrator, only two others have been charged by prosecutors thus far. That would be 3 bad guys, and 7 billion others on this little blue dot.

The 125 players of PSU have done nothing wrong, neither have (upcoming opponents) Nebraska, Ohio State or Wisconsin kids, nor have the schools that are competing with said four schools for the two spots in the championship game. The student athletes, student bodies and fan base of the B1G would all be punished and for what purpose? What would be solved? One pedophile and a half dozen cowards should damage the pocketbooks of eleven innocent schools, a great conference, and the joy of millions? Really?

The Pendulum Swings

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/us/politics/ohio-turns-back-a-law-limiting-unions-rights.html?hp

'I hear your complaints,' Bloomberg said. 'Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that. 'But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will.



"'They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans.'The subprime thing is in the process of being repeated.


Then banks had to concoct ways to make that worthless mortgage worth something to them. So they found ways to sell what was worthless to a bunch of dupes who they lied to about what they were selling; and then those dupes figured out that they were dupes, and they repackaged the whole thing to another set of dupes. And that kept happening, until finally they run out of dupes -- just like the end of a Ponzi scheme. At the end of the day, there weren't any dupes left to buy these worthless mortgages.

Words of Wisdom

Gerry Spence a Wyoming Lawyer

A corporation is a fiction that relieves man of responsibility to his neighbor. It permits him to do in the name of a corporation what he would not do in his own name. It shields him from from his human conscience.

The best way to get management's attention is to punish management directly. Why shouldn't the the corporation's leaders be as responsible for what he does on the job as he is responsible for what he does driving home from the job. If he runs someone down , we do not permit him to blame the car, nor should he be permitted to lay responsibility for wrongdoing of his company on the corporate machine

When the CEO of a corporation and the Board of Director's knows they will suffer personally then corporate crime will come under control. When corporate heads are charged with only one responsibility to make a profit---- we guarantee crime!

If the battle against Wall Street corruption were to fine based on a percentage of the firms net worth, we would have fewer crimes.

The President of a Corporation would not walk over to his neighbor's house and sell him a worthless IOU, knowing full well that it will never be paid, but yet his firm is doing that daily to strangers. If he did that to his neighbor, he would be jailed, but under corporate name, not so.

Corporate law needs to change in this country that is what Occupy Wall Street is saying so the Faux news channel calling the demonstrator's scum is really disgusting. They know something is wrong. Clarence Darrow said "Justice cannot be defined, it is something that can be felt. But the feeling of justice requires the wrong to be righted."

By the way most of this came from Gerry Spence in his book "Justice For None" published in 1990

Occupy Wall Street is wrong Think Again!

Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is screwed up period.

Democrats Efforts at Deficit Reduction Thwarted - Again

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/boehner-rejects-democratic-3-trillion-deficit-reduction-proposal-to-supercommittee/2011/10/27/gIQABPr2MM_story.html?hpid=z1

Incoherent Grumbling or Stunned Silence

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-scientific-finding-that-settles-the-climate-change-debate/2011/03/01/gIQAd6QfDM_story.html?hpid=z2

We are $14 T in debt.

We are $4 T in debt since Obama took control (about $8 since 2006-Democratic congress).

We are in debt $1.3 this year.


So...have we undertaxed the wealthy $1.3 T this year?  $4 T during the Obama era?