Another Month…Another Novosad anti-Obama Letter

Mr. Allen Novosad has posted another anti-Obama letter, but it hasn’t made our on line forum yet, so I’m not able to provide a link. While we are on that subject, I could not access the digital version of the Victoria Advocate using the forum this morning. Luckily, I have the VA app on my iPad.

Mr. Novosad you have a serious case of Obama derangement syndrome. You are now blaming the voters who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 for the struggling economy and national debt. The debt has been accumulating for decades, but our country is showing signs of recovery. President Obama held his head high at the recent G7/G8 meetings because the United States and Germany were the only participants at that summit who could point to signs of recovery. We have a long way to go because even at our most positive predictions show that we won’t have unemployment at 5% until the year 2020. The Fed Chairman just hinted that he might take off the training wheels off (quantitative easing) in the fall because of the improvement he is seeing. Can you name one GOP bill that has been passed ,in the last fours years, that is responsible for the economic gains?

Mr. Novosad said Democrats and others who voted for President Obama were blinded by his blackness and rhetorical skills so much that we overlooked his lack of experience. This is coming from someone who will probably vote for someone like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or Rand Paul and was willing to elect the likes of Sarah Palin to be vice president. A man like Allen Novosad will never understand the meaning of “hello pot meet kettle.”

I have to remind Mr. Novosad, that the 2008 financial crisis happened in the fall of 2008, so the voters were unlikely to turn over the reins to the party who got us into the mess. Mr. Obama won the three presidential debates, and he won by a landslide. In fairness to John McCain, no Republican could have beaten Barrack Obama or Hillary in 2008. If Hillary  had won, you would have used the “she was elected because people wanted the first woman president.” It’s never “we lost because people do not like our policies, agenda or ideology.” You keeping thinking that you won even thou the GOP has lost the presidential popular votes in the last five of six elections.

In 2012, the economy was terrible and the Republicans had a chance to unseat the incumbent but your party chose to elect the most electable from the clown show that they had to choose from.  Your party ran a Wall Street Republican who blamed the 47% as being takers in our struggling economy. Mitt Romney promised more tax cuts for the rich and a tax plan that would cut taxes by 20% across the board, but he never said how and the rest is history. You can blame it on a hurricane,naïve voters, or anything else you want but it won’t change the results.

Republicans like Novosad always leave out the part about key members of GOP leadership (on the night of the first Obama presidential inaugural festivities,) cooking up a plan to deny the president any support. They also forget that Democrats and independents favored Obama’s plan for health care over the GOP plan during the election. Yes, the Dems went alone because they didn’t have another option. They only had 59 senators (we all know it takes 60 votes to approve anything, nowadays) because the Coleman/Franken race in Minnesota was held up in the courts for a while. The Affordable Care Act, when fully implemented, will make believers out of many skeptics but the GOP loyalists will fight it to the bitter end.

Scandals you say Mr. Novasad, but they will never meet the definition of a real scandal like invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and is the basis for the turmoil that we see in the Middle East today. The scandals Mr. Novosad mentioned are just scripts for the next Fox News show. The American people are worried about jobs not about so-called scandals that never materialize. Allen will never know that a self-admitted conservative Republican IRS office manager in Cincinnati said the screening technique used were not politically motivated. You see; Mr. Novosad will never read the actual transcripts of the investigation. Republicans are frustrated because President Obama is as pure as the driven snow when it comes to ethics. Remember, he was only a senator for two years, so Washington did not get a chance to corrupt him. You can legitimately be against his policies and ideology, but you are going to have to find the smoking gun before you can mire him in scandal.

Mr. Novosad named the usual six Obama scandals but one of them made me laugh out loud. He blamed the Obama administration for obtaining billions of phone calls and Internet information on American citizens. Hello, Allen, did you have a good five-year nap? Those policies existed under warrantless surveillance for several years before Obama became president. I read where NSA wiretapped Senator Obama in 2004.

No, Mr. Novosad, the Democratic congressmen are not the cause for the so-called danger you think our nation is experiencing, and your way of life may not be what the majority of America wants.

Congress has an all-time low 10% approval, and your party controls one body of Congress. Your party could not pass the usual bipartisan farm bill because your far-right representatives put in some poison pills. Your party wanted to cut $20 billion from the food stamp program and give those funds to millionaire farmers. No self-respected Democrat would ever do that. The 62 Republicans who voted against the bill only did so because they didn’t think that the cuts in food stamps were enough. The people you should be going after are the far-right loons in your party like Louie Gohmert, who said.” "When I look into the eyes of constituents, who want to provide for their children … and they talk about standing in line, I've heard this story so many times … standing in line at a grocery store behind people with a food-stamp car—one individual said, I love crab legs. You know, the big king crab legs. I love those. But we haven't been able to have those in who knows when. But I'm standing behind a guy who has those in his basket, and I'm looking longingly like, when can I ever make enough again where our family can have something like that, and sees the food-stamp card pulled out, and provided, he looks at the king crab legs and looks at the ground meat, and realizes because he does pay income tax, he doesn't get more back than he pays in, he is actually helping pay for the king crab legs when he can't pay for them for himself." It’s statements like these that make your party less credible because they have become commonplace. We can’t go one day without hearing a stupid comment by a Republican. It’s sad because people like Allen Novosad believe in people like Louie Gohmert because he tickles their ears. The crazies on the right dominate politics because the media loves to interview crazy people (yes,the crazy comments are only coming from the right) but it’s making the Democratic Party the default for serious governing. The Democrats will get all the blame because they are expected to govern but without a challenge, our party will become complacent.

It’s just the first bite of the apple

My goodness, you would've thought that the deal that was made to prevent us from going over the fiscal cliff was the last chance at legislating.  This morning Joe Scarborough was ranting and raving because for the first time in over 20 years, Republicans raised taxes.  According to Grover Norquist, Republicans lowered taxes but try convincing those who make over $450,000 next year when they get their  tax bill.  Joe went on and on about Paul Ryan voting for a bill (without tax cuts) that will add $4 trillion over the next decade. He was so mad that he said Ryan voted for the $7 trillion Medicare prescription bill a few years ago, so he stripped him of his deficit hawk title.  Joe Scarborough is one of those libertarians / conservatives who think republicans should just be reforming the entitlements and reducing the size of government; nothing else.

For the average Americans, they get to keep their credits for the next five years, so they can plan accordingly.  Economists have told us that business wants certainty, this bill gives them that, so hopefully we will stabilize the markets and increase consumer confidence. American workers will see a 2% reduction in their paychecks because the Social Security payroll deduction rate went back to 6.2%. Two million unemployed Americans got a one year extension of unemployment benefits.Neither party got all they wanted but that's what compromise is all about.

Ricci Ware, radio host for San Antonio's KTSA radio, said liberals were walking around with their chest out because they stuck it to the rich man. He also said that we were headed for a socialist agenda. The libertarian / conservatives are angry because they lost the argument about tax cuts paying for themselves and the hideous thought of ever raising taxes. That small group cannot win national elections on two goals: reducing government and reforming entitlements. We do have to reform entitlements and reduce government, but we have to take a balance approach, and the goal should be efficiency because it's obvious people do not want to give up Social Security and Medicare.

There are two big battles just around the corner: raising the debt limit and the sequester cuts. The president said that he won't partake in a battle to raise the debt limit to pay the bills' Congress agreed to make.  I guess that he could veto the bill and make the Congress pass it with a 2/3 vote, which is virtually impossible.  The leverage on the debt ceiling belongs to the GOP because they have proven that our credit rating and an unstable world financial condition takes a back seat to lowering our deficit and debt. The GOP will hold up other projects President Obama wants to undertake like illegal immigration comprehensive reform, infrastructure, energy policies, gun control and unemployment.

There's only one way to avoid the unnecessary 11th-hour  decisions our Congress is undertaking.  We need a grand bargain to reform the entitlements' minus Social Security because the latter does not increase the deficit, and it's in pretty good shape for right now.  That could be a standalone bipartisan commission fix.  We mustn't forget defense department waste, and we shouldn't get fixated on today's numbers because that will change once our economy starts to pick up.  We also have to factor in us leaving Afghanistan.  We can also cut out several loopholes but keep our progressive tax system.

Burnt Out

The other day I received an e-mail suggesting that a lot of us are burnt out. I accepted that for most people, but I'm a political junkie, who's always craving for more, so I thought I was above that. This morning, I just turned off the television, got on my bicycle went on a long ride because I got my fill of pundits telling me, "today's poll shows Romney ahead in this poll but Obama is ahead in early voting in the exact same poll. "

It's sad that our presidential election results comes down to about 113 counties and six states. We are so polarized and entrenched in our beliefs. It's sad how someone can make a fool of himself on a national stage like Governor Rick Perry did, go out and stump for Mitt Romney in Colorado and only manage to attract 60 people, but he still might be our next governor. I know it used to happen in the south all the time, but we now live in the days of Google where we can do some instant fact checking. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.

We now live in an era where marketing trumps the truth and if Mitt Romney wins using this method, it will be the standard bearer for all political campaigns in the future. The Romney campaign brushed aside the fact checkers early in the campaign, and it worked. Mitt Romney did a complete makeover for the first debate, and it worked because it threw the president completely off his game. We now have a virtual tie with the same President Obama competing with a different Mitt Romney than the one who won the GOP nomination. This is a gentler kinder Mitt Romney (in the last 3 weeks) who doesn't scare the soccer moms and says he will work with the opposition, although when he had a chance to do that as governor, he vetoed over 800 bills. It's the same Mitt Romney who constantly whined about the president attacking him in the third debate, as if he didn't stoop to that in the first and second debate.

The debates have come down to, who can say the memorable lines that will be talked about tomorrow and looking presidential; whatever that means. I can't believe that I sat there nervously saying, " please don't go all Ninja on him, President Obama" in one segment and in another I'm saying, " are you just going to sit there and let him get away with that?" The pundits have it right, it’s reality TV. That's too bad because global warming was not mentioned, the poor were mentioned only as an afterthought about food stamps, and competing thoughts about our education system was not discussed. Both candidates gave lip service to the latter and Mitt said he loved teachers, but it was more in the abstract. The president praised his "Race to the Top" effort, but we won't see the results for another other 10 years or so.

It's funny how I initially stayed away from Twitter because of the limited 140 characters, but I now prefer that media because it gives me back responses in real time. You get away from the “cut and paste" crowd but still have the ability to back up your statements with a link. Yes, I have to sort through a lot of tweets before I get to a good one, but it's usually worth the effort. I like having my smart phone nearby as I watch the debates because I can pull up Twitter, and someone has done all the fact checking for me. The best part about Twitter is that you don’t have to argue with nitwits who don’t know the basics of democracy, civics or economics. They still think a single person can lead our nation into socialism just because of their literal interpretation of the “general welfare clause “of our constitution.

In the next 13 days, I'm either going to quit blogging altogether, take a long exodus, or blog about something else other than politics; regardless of the election results. I successfully transitioned away from the VA forum without any lingering regrets, and I suspect walking away from a personal blog won't be that difficult. This is not a surprise to the people I have constant contact with via email because I made a decision way back in January, but then it was about quitting the VA forum and concentrating on a personal blog.