Saturday, December 18, 2010

POLI MORE ITCHES THAN TICKLES

It awaketh. It returneth. It bloggeth.


One has to wonder... well, hopefully, more than one! Are you wondering? One has to wonder why it is that the full extent and impact of the Watergate debacle was felt only after Nixon was reelected. One has to wonder why election reform -- in particular the issue of how ballots are handled, including the dangling chad problem, certainly already known before the 2000 election -- was only whispered about instead of screamed for until after Dubya was crowned. Now one is wondering why it is only after the 2010 elections that results are issued for a study of news networks' levels of mis- and disinformation.

(I guess you might wonder why I awaken, return and blog ater the "compromise" has been passed by a cowardly Congress [excluding from that adjective some noble representatives, such as my own state's upstanding Keith Ellison, who voted no].)

Those of us with a few remaining brain cells could have told you Fox News lied, but would you have believed us? At best you'd have said 1. they only get things wrong once in a while and 2. they didn't do it on purpose, besides which 3. they really weren't that wrong. The truth (remember truth?) is that 1. they get it wrong almost all the time and when they get it right they twist it to mean something else, and 2. they do it on purpose, besides which 3. you still believe them!

For information about the study, check out http://www.alternet.org/media/149193/study_confirms_that_fox_news_makes_you_stupid%20.

If I knew where clues were being sold, I'd buy them up, even without coupons, and put 'em in the water, so everyone could get one. America seriously needs to be clued in, and America seriously needs to pay attention while being clued in.

One of the issues on which America needs to become clueful is that of tax breaks for the very wealthy. Many of you think that the tax breaks either being extended or not (it's all down to Obama's signature now) affect you. (Some of you appear to think there is a tax cut in it for you; there isn't. What there is, though, is the fact that unemployment benefits are being held hostage by those who want the extension of the tax breaks; if the rich don't get a few more years of breaks, unemployment benefits won't be extended, and if the rich do get a few more years of breaks, unemployment benefits will still only be extended 13 more months. Wow, that's fair! Meanwhile, the Payroll tax, from which Social Security is funded, is also being cut.) If you're not one of the wealthiest folks in the country -- in the top two percent -- it affects you all right; they will be getting a tax break at your expense. Others of you seem to think that giving that two percent of the population a continuation on the taxc break they've had a few years already will create new jobs, or at least stop old ones from going byebye. Well... has it worked so far? (Get a clue!) Not al extremely wealthy people have closed their American locations, laying off American workers, and outsourced jobs overseas (let's not even get into the issue of slave labor): just whole bunches of them. Trickle-down didn't work for Reagan (well it may have worked for him personally but it didn't work for America under Reagan) and it didn't work for Dubya and it won't work now or in the future either. Here is a nifty article about some (not all) of the reasons it doesn't and won't: http://www.alternet.org/economy/149201/tax_cuts_simply_do_not_create_jobs . I don't believe it mentions that the tax breaks are for individuals, not corporations, but apart from that, it explains the situation quite clearly.

Amazingly, those of you who think the incredibly wealthy are going to stop screwing you and create jobs and fund programs you won't let the government fund (which it could if the rich would just pay their damned taxes) also think that immigrants (legal and illegal alike) who pick fruit and clean toilets for virtually no money, so that they can live in appalling conditions and be generally abused) are causing unemployment. If your only employment option is to clean toilets, I can't help wondering why you are so hot to extend tax breaks for people who pay other people to defecate for them and would deprive you of your measly, inadequate unemployment benefits.

Time for you to think.  Time for me to retreat, nap, stop, for the nonce, blogging.

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