What is attractive or honest about the GOP?

Now as I understand it there was a very popular and influential politician in Texas that had all of the right-wing qualities that would make him a good candidate for the continued destruction of this country if he was doing his damage in the Senate. But along the way he was trounced in a run-off election because he wasn’t enough to the right. Now the Republican’s have a weak candidate offering no experience but a strong affiliation with the Tea Party.

Help!

Has anyone stopped to remember that the original Tea Party was basically a terrorist group out to destroy things and scare people. Then again, that’s an excellent understanding of the current Tea Party. I am hearing in some more progressive areas that this is a wonderful opportunity for the Democratic party. Open the doors and welcome all the traditional Republicans to come on over to sanity. Do they really think sticking with Mitt Romney is a good idea? When is Mitt the Twitt going to blurt out the really bad gaff and destroy his own candidacy? Is Harry Reid on target with his speculation about Mitt’s tax returns?

To me people will vote Republican if they are

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Wages Up .. Spending Up .. Economy Up

While the [National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB)] warns that minimum wage increases would create serious cost problems for small businesses, few of their members list “labor costs” as their “most important problem.” Instead, what we see from the NFIB survey results is that the percentage of small businesses listing labor costs as their most important problem has hovered consistently between 3% and 5% since the beginning of the recession in December 2007. In the most recent data, the percentage fell to 2%, its lowest level since the start of the recession.

That was excerpted from an article from the Center for Economic Policy and Research that was reprinted in Nation of Change. The title of the article is Poor Sales, Not High Wages, Worry Small Businesses.

The message of this article is much in line with my own thinking and clearly demonstrates that the plutocrats on the right are creating a fictional and damaging wedge issue that may gain them more power and wealth but will seriously hurt the economy of the United States and more specifically, the small business owners that they pretend to support.

If the current economic crisis is dealt with by accepting more and more austerity, there will never be a recovery that reaches down to the level of the small-business owners. If you take more and more money away from the 99% and give it to the 1%, the country will not be saved by the myth of the trickle-down: most of the wealth of the 1% is designed to maintain the wealth of the 1% and to increase the power of the 1%. The other 99%, including the small-business owners, will have less and less money to spend on the economy at their level (they aren’t expected to buy a new yacht in the next six months) and it’s not hard to see that if the majority of the people have little or no money to spend beyond necessities (and with the high costs of some of those necessities, like healthcare, even they are problematical) they will be unable to purchase the goods and services of the small-business owners. Then how long can the small-business owner last?

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Not the Land of the Free

I hope no one missed the piece in the Washington Post by Jonathan Turley identifying “10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.” I suspect that the list could have been longer, much longer if social and economic factors had been included, but Turley’s ten examples are bad enough. It is sad to realize how the freedoms we once took for granted were taken away from us by our own leaders. Al Qaeda’s biggest threat to us was never really terror: it was the excuse that terror provided, allowing a fascist neocon group to take over the country from within, and that is doubly sad.

I’m just going to list the ten items from the editorial.

Assassination of U.S. citizens
Indefinite detention
Arbitrary justice
Warrantless searches
Secret evidence
War crimes
Secret court
Immunity from judicial review
Continual monitoring of citizens
Extraordinary renditions

What is tragic is that the same people who created these losses to our freedom also brought us two unpaid wars, unbridled crony capitalism and corruption, and now want further to destroy the fabric of this country in favor of a plutocracy or even an out-and-out fascist government. They wave the Constitution and demand that it be followed but then they subvert it with impunity. There are clear parallels in history that indicate the direction this country is heading, and the prospects are not good for the planet.

I suppose the greatest tragedy isn’t that the people of this country are giving up their freedom for a lie, but rather that they don’t even realize it. The strongest defense against tyranny is critical thinking. As I see it, we are doomed.

(Original editorial at the Washington Post)