"Confused" Grampa, Thriftfully Drives Car Off Cliff !

Old Grampa's confused state may make him a cute and cuddly member of the family ... but would you really pick him to lead you and your family out of a burning office building?

The group that is currently getting the most press coverage as they attack President Obama's stimulus efforts, has decided to choose Senator John McCain as their leader.

John McCain, the man who admitted just a few months ago that,

“The issue of economics is something that I’ve really never understood as well as I should.” (Boston Globe,12/18/07),

and then at the GOP debate in Fla clearly demonstrated his economic cluelessness by stating,

“I don’t believe we’re headed into a recession. I believe the fundamentals of this economy are strong, and I believe they will remain strong.” (GOP Debate, Myrtle Beach, FNC, 1/10/08)

Yes, this very same man is now saying that he has all the answers and we should scrap the plan of the man we just chose as our President and instead, follow him.
Either he has copious amounts of audacity or he suffers from short term memory loss.Or perhaps, both.

Still, he just might succeed in gathering a mob. Because, while the President is giving us the straight, hard news - Senator McCain is telling everyone what they want to hear.
This man, who told us that he didn't really understand the economy, is now saying that with his plan we can fix the economy at half the cost.
Swell.

Our economy is very very sick and the danger with Senator McCain's fairytale ending is that we will skimp on our unpopular meds, taking less then the prescribed dosage to save money.
The result? Instead of spending $850 billion and being on the road to recovery - we will have spent just $421 billion and be even sicker then we are now.

Specialists, (people who's profession IS understanding the economy) have prescribed some nasty tasting, VERY expensive medicine. No one wants to have to do this thing, Mr. McCain but sometimes you have to make the tough choices and you have to be strong and you have to take your medicine - ALL OF IT.

Thank you Mr. President

In a press conference today, President Obama finally spoke out against his critics and said what I had been writing here for days.

http://tinyurl.com/bsfxom

Obama said the criticisms he has heard "echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems."

"I reject those theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change," said the president, who was elected with an Electoral College landslide last fall and enjoys high public approval ratings at the outset of his term.

President Obama continues to "reach across the isle" and allow the Republicans to have their say on what spending items stay or go ... but it's time for them to come to terms with the fact that they are no longer steering this ship.

Welfare queen

Some of you kids out there may not remember this term. It was heavily used during Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign when he described a "welfare queen" from Chicago's South Side. In this "made for sound bite" tale, there was a woman receiving government assistance and she had supposedly used the money to buy a Cadillac and was living the "high life" on the Tax payer's money.

Soon, the far right was in full on "foaming at the mouth mode", crying out against an imagine army of "project" dwelling freeloaders.

All of this was far from the truth of course. While you can always find a handful of people to support ANY stereotype (especially when you are talking about the MILLIONS that require government assistance just to survive) this "living the high-life on taxpayer money" just wasn't a reality. Those that were abusing government assistance were a barely visable blip on the budget radar screen. The Reagan mob could have had every one of those who were mis-using their "welfare" checks shipped off to Gitmo and it wouldn't have reduced the money that was needed by even a 10th of a percent.

Still, the OUTRAGE behind this idea - the idea that ANYONE would take Government assistance and selfishly spend it on themselves - was pivotal in swinging voters to Reagan's side.

Fast foreword to NOW.

Through a series of VERY bad financial decisions based on terrible and inept judgment at best and simple greed at worst, Wall Street financial firms have destroyed themselves and much of this nations economy. Wasting no time, they marched into Congress and demanded that the Taxpayers bail them out of this mess or they were going to take everyone down with them.
So congress wrote them some REALLY BIG WELFARE CHECKS with the intention that they use that money to continue making payroll, pay their debts and lend it to Americans in need.

Instead, these modern day Welfare Queens used the money to go shopping for smaller banks, to prop up banks overseas, to share with their stock holders, and to pay themselves multi million dollar bonuses.
They took tax payer assistance money, meant to keep their doors open and paid themselves bonuses for the previous years disastrous efforts. Do you know how many Cadillacs 1 million dollars is?

Why is what they are doing any different then what the Regan administration was vilifying?

Where is the national outrage?

Pot calling kettle, come in kettle ...

Hang on, the spin is going into top speed.

The Republican's cry "PORK" over and over again but have you heard even one of them give any hard figures about how much of the proposed stimulus package they actually consider "pork"?
No, you haven't.
That's because all their rhetoric is just a smoke screen. If you cut everything out of this package that they don't like ... the price tag STILL doesn't drop below $800 billion!
In fact, since the bill has left the House and the President has continued to press the Republicans for their input ... the price tag has actually gone up! Gone up to the point that the President has had to instruct them to try and keep it under $900 billion.

The Republicans are crying crocodile tears, making a big spectacle over how expensive this is because they know how appalling it is to the tax payers. In reality though, they have no intention of reducing the price tag by ANY appreciable amount.
They just hope that if they protest about it loudly enough, the public will be duped into thinking they had nothing to do with it. They're patting the public on the head with one hand while slapping them in the face with the other.