Daily Music Selection“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw 1. The Republicans are going to end earmarks. Ha, ha! Both parties, but especially the GOP, thrive on earmarks – not only does it bring home the bacon, but it’s a nice covert way to reward their corporate sponsors. The typically devious Republicans, with the help of some Blue Dog Dems in the Senate, are just going to change the name to something like ‘help American families add-ons’ or ‘freedom appropriation inserts’ and continue to happily earmark away. 2. The Republican Party is now strong. Another laugher. The GOP had to rebrand as the ‘new Tea Party GOP’ in 2010 and none of their candidates dared campaign with Junior Bush. In TV ads, many GOP candidates did not even mention they were Republicans. Rand Paul, the only true Teabagger in the Senate, is now making noises like a “go along to get along” guy, and various naïve Teabaggers in the House, like the anti-government-paid health care dimwit who demanded his government-paid health care ahead of schedule, have begun showing their strong streak of stupid, even before January’s official swearing in. Most of us have noticed it’s not…
Big money talked and the local media walked. “Unchecked by even rudimentary campaign finance regulation, unchallenged by a journalism sufficient to identify and expose abuses of the electoral process and abetted by commercial broadcasters that this year pocketed $3 billion in political ad revenues, the money-and-media election complex was a nearly unbeatable force in 2010. “Of fifty-three competitive House districts where Rove and his compatriots backed Republicans with ‘independent’ expenditures that exceeded those made on behalf of Democrats-often by more than $1 million per district, according to Public Citizen-the Republicans won fifty-one. Roughly three-quarters of all GOP House gains came in districts where independent expenditures by groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove’s American Crossroads gave Republican candidates, some of them virtual unknowns until the outside money flowed in, the advantage. The money is powerful, of course, but that power is supercharged because of the decay, and in many cases disappearance, of independent and skeptical journalism at the state and regional levels, where elections are decided. Campaign narratives used to be created by reporters who, imperfectly but seriously, pulled together the multiple threads of an election season to give voters perspective. Now that narrative is driven by commercials-millions of…
By W.B. Dunne This one goes out to the youngsters out there who have only begun to experience the political process in America. The ones who voted Obama into office and are now seeing the correction for the first time in these midterms: The Democrats won in a landslide in 2010 for the first time ever in a midterm election, and the fact that there is a “Speaker Boehner” on November third is due to a Supreme Court decision, the Koch Brothers, Fox News, the US Chamber of Commerce, and Karl Rove. The NP reminds the young voter that the great court supported the corrupted GOP with its Citizens United decision, allowing for unlimited and undisclosed money from corporations and foreign interests in the campaign. The unintended consequence was that it helped the Tea Party candidates too, and that fact threatens to split the right wing in the House of Representatives. A silver lining for Progressives if ever there was one! Hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign interference has bought the corporate masters precious little. Speaker Boehner will get what he always wanted and was promised long ago, the mantle of Head of the GOP Majority, but it will…
First off, in my previous ‘Toast and Coast’ pieces, I accurately predicted that Republican Teabaggers Linda McMahon, Carl Paladino, and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Palins, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, were all toast, along with the Billionaire Girls Club of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. G.I. Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado are still undecided at this hour. That leaves two where the Tattler’s crystal ball was cloudy – Rand “There’s Something About an Aqua Buddha Man” Paul in Kentucky and Mark “Captain Blight” Kirk in Illinois – but 6 out of 8 ain’t bad. Ron Paul’s offshoot was the biggest surprise, but probably should not have been in a Red State that elected a turtle wax replicant like the sour-lipped Mitch McConnell to the Senate. As I watched the televised bulletins from the Planet Xenon otherwise known as the Mainstream Media carve up and autopsy What This Election Means today, of course the MSM managed to bungle and bypass any realistic diagnosis as they became trapped in the humbug of their own quackery and delusion. A blur of the Pundit Class’ finest recruits for Perdition hilariously kept sawing on some iteration of this soggy paper-maché…
What do you do if you’re a former CEO who has so badly screwed-up in your past jobs that no one will hire you, yet you enjoy being treated like a queen? You run for high office, of course, just like big business duds Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman! “One of Fiorina’s tentpole mantras is that she ran Hewlett-Packard from 1999-2005. Into the ground, she should have added. Fiorina has been hazed as one of the worst American CEOs of all time for paying herself fat bonuses while axing tens of thousands of California-based employees and offshoring some of their jobs, forcing a doomed merger with computer also-ran Compaq past HP’s founding families and board of directors, polishing her public image as the company’s stock imploded by more than half during her tenure, and much more — all before being fired in 2005.” – Scott Thrill, “8 Reasons Why Carly Fiorina Would Be a Disaster in the Senate,” AlterNet, Oct. 30, 2010. “Rather than the team-oriented approach that had characterized HP since its founding, Fiorina instituted a top-down culture. She got herself on the covers of glossy magazines. Most good CEOs put employees, shareholders and customers ahead of themselves. Fiorina…
