To me the Tea Party is wrongheaded and not focusing on what we need. I've been for balancing the budget all my life but we're in a deep recession and the emphasis has got to be jobs. Balancing the budget will add unemployment (from government employees and people that would have received extended benefits like unemployment). Their emphasis on the founding fathers, who are a mixed batch of quality and beliefs, and the constitution, are just irrelevancies as to any current issues. There is no magic to the constitution and we face things threatoning our economy and even our world. Making noise about following a flawed document from simpler times will not help. Some, like Perry and Paul, want to eliminate all "progressive" changes. This would include safety regulations (health, drugs, environment etc.), workers' rights (vacation pay, social security, worker's comp, overtime, bans on child labor) and other things we consider basic human rights after having them for many decades. Besides jobs creation, the thing that strikes me as a major misdirection of our system is our military strategy after the fall of the Soviets. We spend as much on military as the rest of the world combined, and have 100,000s of thousands of personnel in bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, Germany and other nations where it is way past the time to get the heck out. Iraq was the worst mistake of our times and we still have 50,000 people there. The republican emphasis that Obama pass nothing (they often vote to the last man "NO!") and be a one-termer has not allowed the democratic mandate from 2008 to accomplish much legislation. In taking one house the Republicans don't have much of a mandate and yet they forced this debt ceiling issue to get some policies that they do not have the votes to pass legitimately. It was economic terrorism and caused the silly S&P downgrade of the US as a debtor. The downgrade was silly because if the US isn't AAA, then who is? If our economy went down, no country economy would be safe. The tea partiers are even more uncompromising unlike their founding father heroes who made huge compromises (such as leaving out slavery), to create the bill of rights and the constitution. It also left women and children as property.
I do think it is rather unfair to put Perry and Paul in the same category. If you look at Ron Paul's stance on a lot of these issues (environment as an example), he explains how there are many "property rights" that could function as great checks and balances against corporations that pollute.
ReplyDeleteI voted for Obama. Since he has been in office, what happened to all of these frickin anti-war protests?! For God's sake, our troops are over there getting killed and maimed daily. I'm disgusted... and we can't even properly care for these poor troops that come home messed up.
As much as I've been ranting/carrying on about Ron Paul, I would still never vote for Rick Perry... mostly because he's an idiot. Let's have a little more religious vigor in our politics! (That was sarcastic)
Obama has almost been more pro-war than King George (W)was... Gitmo is still open... and on.
At least Ron Paul is for getting out of these dumbass wars. And at this point, I am all over that.
The tea party generalizations (guilty!) were from Perry and Paul. They may not be average partiers but they and Bachman could be considered as party spokesman since that is one of the groups (besides Republicans) that they are appealing to.
ReplyDeleteThe Jeff specific points on Boeing and the card checks seem like good gripes to be making.
I am all for getting out of the wars and if Paul were the candidate, I would have to think hard on that even though I'd worry about what he'd do writing executive enforcement regulations and trying to pass laws if it were a solid Republican congress. Bush was a candidate that I could never vote for due to the Iraq war (not considering the other objections I have to him) and if that light is turned on Obama vs. Paul I might have to go anti-war.
I don't see Jeff Cohen's comment that I read and responded to earlier. My response and his original post, which had some interesting points about Boeing in South Carolina and Card Checks for union members (with some insulting stuff using the word stooge etc.) is gone. I didn't delete it.
ReplyDeleteMust be the long arm of Obama?!
ReplyDeleteAh I found it in an email notification I got so I'll repost it here: Regarding your tripe about Tea Party folks hating employee rights and wanting to throw away worker's comp, unemployment, vacation pay, minimum wage, overtime, social security and Medicare, you must have a vivid imagination or are using drugs, because your run of the mill Tea Party folk are statistically the most employed political group in America - So, why would they want to do away with such services. They don't. What do they want? They don't want Obama to to make card-check happen and they want to reduce the overwhelming control that big labor has on the Obama Administration. A perfect example is the unelected stooges running the Labor Relations Board who have put a hold on the new Boeing plant in South Carolina. Boeing has invested a billion dollars in this plant to build the new 787 Dreamliner, which will employ thousands. And the LRB has put the hold on this S.C. plant, even though not one Boeing labor job will be lost in Seattle by the building of the plant in South Carolina. In fact, Boeing will be building new production of 3 787's per month at their Seattle plant, with 7 per month planned in S.C., if it ever opens. After 3 major strikes by labor unions in Seattle, in as many years, creating much havoc, enmity from customers, competitive disadvantage and significant $ losses to Boeing, if Ralph was a shareholder of Boeing, let alone running the company, he'd be crying like a stuck pig to get a plant built fast in a Right-To-Work state. Frankly, the famous letter by an officer of the Boeing company simply tells a fact of life, that with labor unions in Seattle shutting down your factory regularly, a company like Boeing will always be at a disadvantage competitively with Airbus. Nothing in the letter was illegal, unless the reader is a labor stooge taking orders from Obama. Unfortunately, Boeing will probably have to wait until Rick Perry is President and can rid the Obama appointed anti-business stooges in the LRB and let the S.C plant flourish. Obviously, the 3,000 folks in S.C being denied a chance to go to work, while the labor plant in Seattle is adding new production, is nothing more than a sop to the labor unions and all the money they will give Obama for re-election. Anyway, it really doesn't concern Obama, because the economic needs of Americans in S.C. don't matter, since Obama has no chance to win the state of S.C. in November of 2012.
ReplyDeleteJeff/GoPerry
The tripe (ah an insult in the first line when insults are supposed to be banned) came from Perry & Paul as mentioned by Mitch and me above. They both want to do away with all those "over-protective" laws. I don't like the card check either and I imagine that there is not support that Obama does and definately none that he is for the Boeing closure (but is it closed....it's supposed to open in 2013...maybe work is stopped?). Appointments don't always do what the Pres. wants. Boeing isn't exactly cooperating (refusing to produce documents) or working to resolve this while anyone outside the conflict is pushing hard for a settlement. This probably technically is a violation of the retaliation prohibition but perhaps that is what needs to be changed. A lot of the news articles mention that Boeing people said this was for worker reliability to avoid strikes although officially Boeing denies this (which probably is a lie?).
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