Month: April 2011

The Donald Trump Phenomenon: It Can Only Hurt The Republican Party And Help The Democrats!

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Real estate mogul Donald Trump is on a tear, exploiting the “Birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama, and he has now surged in some polls to a lead in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012.

Despite his multiple business bankruptcies, his three marriages, and his tendency to “shoot from the hip” with ridiculous and reckless statements and assertions over many years, Trump is suddenly taking all of the oxygen out of the air in the Republican Party.

Trump is becoming more ridiculous and even stupid as he marches on, now claiming, much like Congressman Ben Quayle of Arizona, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, did in his campaign for Congress last year, that President Obama is the absolutely worst President in American history!

For Trump to make such a claim, and say Obama has now surpassed former President Jimmy Carter as the worst President ever, shows his absolute ignorance, as if he had studied history, he would well know that there is a long list of Presidents, mostly before and after Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency, that are FAR worse than either Carter or Obama! In fact, in the first estimate of Obama a year ago, he was rated in the top fifteen of the Presidents, while Carter was rated above at least twelve Presidents, putting him in the second tier of three rankings of the Presidents! And Carter seems certain to move up over time, not down to the bottom five or ten, as some like to state, which shows their total lack of knowledge and understanding of the history of the Presidency!

Also, when Trump was asked how many members there are of the House Of Representatives, he was annoyed and refused to answer, a sign that he did not know, putting him in the same camp as being stupid and ignorant as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum, all of whom have shown they have no clue about any facts or details of our nation’s history!

Why should Donald Trump be expected to know anything other than how to make money, fire people on his television show, and look for constant publicity, since, after all, he inherited his wealth, and has never known what it is to be an ordinary American, who has to worry constantly about staying above water economically?

Rather than study and know the issues, Donald Trump would rather talk about telling China off, seizing Iraq oil revenues, and create constant controversy with his loose mouth?

And get this: Trump is now threatening that if he does not win the GOP nomination for President, he might run as an Independent in the 2012 election, and that with spending up to $600 million of his own money, that he could win the White House! In other words, he would buy the job, much like Rick Scott did in Florida”s Governorship race!

But the difference is that the Electoral College, often much maligned, prevents such a possibility, and NEVER has and NEVER will an Independent be able to win the White House! Ross Perot spent $62 million of his fortune, received 19 percent of the vote, but won no electoral votes in 1992! And Theodore Roosevelt, the much beloved former President, ran as a Progressive in 1912, and won only six states and 27 percent of the votes, and 88 electoral votes, an all time high, but nowhere near winning the Presidency! And this was not just anyone, but rather Teddy Roosevelt!

So stay ignorant and stupid, Donald, and spend your money on your own ego, help the economy in so doing, get your publicity and attention that you constantly need, destroy the Republican Party which is doing a good job by itself in doing so by flirting with the Tea Party, and help Barack Obama, supposedly the worst President ever, to win reelection and continue his great leadership of the nation for another four years!

64th Anniversary Of Jackie Robinson Breaking Major League Baseball Color Barrier: The Battle For Civil Rights For All Americans Goes On!

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Today, in the year 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and started all major league sports toward full integration!

Sixty four years later, the battle for civil rights goes on! There is still discrimination, much of it hidden, against African Americans.

But also, we have widespread discrimination against Hispanics and Latinos, as well as against Muslims, and gay Americans! And there are still remnants of prejudice against Jews and Catholics as well!

Native Americans, Asian Americans and women also still face prejudice and denial of equal opportunity!

So as we celebrate Jackie Robinson on this anniversary, which revolutionized major league baseball, remember that the battle for civil rights endures in a nation where too many people still have no problem with racial, ethnic, gender, religious or sexual orientation discrimination!

Chinks In The Armor Of Florida Governor Rick Scott Start To Show!

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Within just two days, Florida Governor Rick Scott, called by many Floridians “King Rick”, because of his arrogance, stubbornness, and dictatorial manner, which has alienated so many people that there are demands for a recall or impeachment of the Medicare scam Governor, has suddenly changed course!

After protests at his inhumane cuts to Medicaid by executive order, he has now bowed to the protests and is rescinding the cuts with the legislature being expected to provide funding to cover the costs he wanted to save.

Also, we have learned that the evidence and facts used by his counsel to make the case against the high speed rail project from Orlando to Tampa were untrue, although now that Florida has rejected those funds, which would have created thousands of jobs and improved the traffic situation in central Florida, it is unlikely that the federal funds will still be available!

Also, Scott has suddenly reversed on the database for prescription medications that he bitterly opposed as an invasion of privacy, despite the fact that Florida is the leading “pill mill” state, particularly for the dangerous drug Oxycodone. Now he reluctantly agrees to it, just as he was about to be blasted by a fellow Governor of Kentucky before a congressional hearing, who was ready to point out that Florida is the biggest source of pill addiction in the nation, and that 42 states already have data registries to keep track of pill sales and distribution!

Despite these concessions, done very reluctantly on the first and third issues listed above, and the likelihood that the high speed rail project is dead after the lies that were used to destroy the project, the move should still be on to remove Rick Scott from the office that he disgraces every day by his actions and words!

Politics Is The Art Of Compromise? Not According To The Republican Leadership!

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One learns in any American Government class that “Politics is the Art of Compromise”!

But, apparently, the Republican Party in Congress and in the states that have Republican Governors, believes just the opposite!

Remember that the Constitution came about through compromises in 1787 in Philadelphia!

Remember that Henry Clay, the greatest member of Congress in American history, promoted compromise as essential for progress!

Bipartisanship has been an important part of much of American history, as for instance, the bipartisanship demonstrated in Congress during the Cold War period, supporting Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower in their reaction to the Soviet threat!

When compromise has not worked, we had the Civil War, which killed 620,000 Americans!

When compromise has not worked, we have seen the stalemate and gridlock that has paralyzed government, and led to inability to take care of the needs of the nation!

Republican Governors have declared war on the concept of compromise, pushing many states in reverse on basic labor rights and human rights!

So the future looks gloomy, as the Republicans have continued to make clear that they will use every method to stop any part of the Obama agenda!

The battle over the 2012 national budget and the national debt is going to be an historic struggle, with no certainty that anything positive will occur! And the future in many states is also gloomy!

The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln 1865: Still Affecting America Today!

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On this day, at around the hour I am writing this, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, by actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, who wished to reverse the Union victory accomplished five days earlier by the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Lincoln looks better all of the time, and we are now commemorating the sequicentennial of the Civil War, which lasted officially from April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865, and killed two percent of the population, approximately 620,000 men!

The sectionalism that helped to cause the Civil War still exists, and much of the South is celebrating the Civil War anniversary, rather than just commemorating it!

American history would have been quite different if Lincoln had lived, and it is still the greatest human tragedy of the nation’s history, as far as any individual’s role in history is concerned.

Much is published regularly about Lincoln, but the mountain of material never stops, and a lot of attention will be given to it over the next four years because of it being 150 years ago, a notable anniversary!

A movie well worth seeing, opening tomorrow, is THE CONSPIRATOR, which portrays the assassination of Lincoln, and the supposed complicity of Mary Surratt, who ran the rooming house where the Lincoln conspiracy was discussed by the group involved in the plot, including her son, John Surratt, who escaped punishment for his complicity in the event, but had his mother become the first woman executed in American history, due to a military tribunal illegally condemning four of the conspirators to death, rather than having trial by a civilian jury!

The movie informs us of the unconstitutional actions taken by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was in such a hurry to eliminate the conspirators that he broke the Bill of Rights, a troubling followup to the tragedy of the Civil War!

It is a warning that even in crisis, we must not forget the Constitution and Bill of Rights, too often ignored in the name of national security!

The Split Political Personality of Minnesota

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Minnesota is certainly not the only state to have a split political personality, but right now it really stands out as unusual!

My colleague, Professor Steve Watnik, pointed this out today, and made me really think about this, so here goes!

Minnesota had great political luminaries in the past, including Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy, and Paul Wellstone, and continues to have some today in Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, and Congressman Keith Ellison, who is the first Muslim in Congress.

But it is also the state of two potential GOP candidates for President: the solid conservative former Governor Tim Pawlenty, who has managed to avoid looking or acting loony or weird, as so many others in the party have appeared; and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has no problem in looking loony and weird, and seems to revel in it, as she displays total ignorance and outrageous comments while claiming to be religious and led by God’s command. Only Sarah Palin may be more outrageous in her behavior and comments than Bachmann, but certainly it is a close race between the two ladies!

So Minnesota is likely to see two home staters competing for the nomination, along with others, and Pawlenty seems legitimate, while Bachmann most certainly does not, all adding to the allure of following Minnesota politics for the Presidential Election year of 2012!

Paul Krugman And Robert Reich Challenge Obama: Stop Giving In To Opposition Republicans!

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Leading liberal, progressive voices such as NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and Professor of Economics at Princeton University, and Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, and Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, have called upon President Obama to stop giving in to Republicans, as they claim he did in December’s and this month’s budget deals.

They call upon the President to work against the temptation to copy the Republicans on the budget issue, and instead call for tax increases on the top two percent, and support the Medicare and Social Security system by recognizing that we must all have shared sacrifice and expect the closing of tax loopholes and the raising of taxes on the middle class, which should have gone up during the Bush administration to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prescription plan for seniors, all of which was paid for with borrowed money.

This is a bold statement by both, and one awaits Barack Obama’s reaction to the Paul Ryan plan to change Medicare to a voucher system and avoid any new taxes.

The Obama speech will be made public today, and it may have a great effect on united backing of Obama within his party for the 2012 election, and certainly will frame the debate over the budget and the raising of the debt ceiling, challenges the country faces before the year ends!

Republican Lies And Deception Gets Worse! Jon Kyl And “Factual Statements”!

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The Republican Party is both famous and infamous for its lies and deceptions on a regular basis!

Is there any sane, normal, truth telling Republican left?

The latest outrage is Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, who claimed that Planned Parenthood spends 90 percent of its money on abortion services!

The problem with Kyl’s statement is that it is a TOTAL DISTORTION of the truth, as only THREE percent of Planned Parenthood funds are spent on abortion, while women’s health services, including fighting breast cancer, is the bulk of their activities, and the GOP is willing to ignore women’s needs in their crazy struggle against abortion, while not giving a damn what happens to children AFTER they are born or to women’s health!

But even worse is that a Kyl spokesman says Kyl defended himself by stating what he said was not meant to be a “factual statement”!

So Kyl is saying that he is exaggerating, lying, manipulating the truth, etc, or is that NOT what he is doing?

One could not make up such stupidities and inanities as this if one wanted to downgrade the Republican Party, as they are much better at doing it to themselves! (head shaking in disbelief)!

150 Years Ago Today, The Civil War Began!

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On this day, April 12, in 1861, 150 years ago, the greatest tragedy in American history began, with the South Carolina government ordering the state militia to commence an attack against the US military fort, Fort Sumter, lying on an island in Charleston Harbor!

620,000 men were killed in the war that ensued for four years minus three days! 360,000 Union soldiers and 260,000 Confederate soldiers lost their lives, and two percent of the population were wiped out, creating a young and middle age male shortage only overcome by immigration over the next two generations!

The South tried to say the war was fought over different civilizations clashing, and the fight for states rights, but the truth is that it was the institution of slavery and its expansion westward and northward which led to the war!

Today, we still hear Southerners and even Westerners threaten secession from the Union, but they well know that cannot be allowed to happen, as the Union won the war and settled the issue of states rights for all time, no matter what radicals say!

The Civil War remains the greatest crisis in American history, and scars still remain, as South Carolina is today celebrating, rather then commemorating, the Fort Sumter attack, as if it is something to be proud of!

But the regionalism that existed then still exists today and affects our politics in the 21st century!

More will be said about the Civil War as we continue to follow the events of that tragic conflict over the next four years!

66 Years Since FDR’s Passing: The New Deal Legacy

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On this day, April 12, in 1945, the second greatest President in American history, Franklin D. Roosevelt, passed away after 12 years and 39 days in office!

The President during the Great Depression and World War II, FDR saved the country from dictatorship and perpetuated democracy; saved the American capitalist system; promoted a sense of hope and faith in the American future; gave people dignity and a sense of optimism; provided millions of Americans with employment and income; promoted thousands of public works projects; gave American labor rights to collective bargaining; revived American agriculture; provided a sense of security for the elderly through the establishment of Social Security; provided public housing and electricity to millions of poor people; and convinced the American people that big national government could be responsive and successful as compared to incompetent state governments!

FDR also saved the country during World War II in the fight against Fascism, Nazism, and Japanese imperialism; advocated the concept of an international organization called the United Nations to promote world peace and cooperation; and promoted American becoming the leader of the free world!

Of course, there are criticisms that can be made of FDR and the New Deal and World War II policies, but despite those, FDR offered so much good service as President, and gave America the future it would have in the next two thirds of a century!

Now, sadly, the Republican Party is starting an assault on the New Deal, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, but liberals, progressives, and the Democratic Party must continue to fight, and not give in, to the reactionaries who wish to return us to the 1920s and Gilded Age mentality!