Weiners and Losers

Who were the winners and losers in last week's midnight hour battle against Big Bird and Planned Parenthood? Winners: New York Democrat Anthony Weiner is a winner in my book because of his tell it like it is feistiness (and I can make a bad pun in the title of my blog), President Obama looked Presidential but not very strong, John Boehner came out ahead in his three way battle with the White House, the Congress, and the Tea Party who showed it has the ability to successfully push bad ideas to the very brink. Oil companies who still receive huge subsidies and the Koch Brothers are also big winners.


Losers: hard to tell for sure, but Democrats, abortion rights in Washington, DC, poor working people everywhere, the environment, education, clean air, clean water, basic fairness and decency.


Not raising the Debt Ceiling and The Republican 2011-2012 budget plan are the next focus for the Republican House. New Republican Budget Motto - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," your senior citizens, your sick children on medicaid, your disabled, your Medicare recipients, your minimum wage earners with no health insurance so that we may cut their programs and raise their taxes in order give a 25% tax break to the wealthy, cut the capital gains rates, and reduce corporate taxes for the Koch Brothers. "We must raise the taxes on the bottom 90% so we can continue the tax breaks and subsidies for corporations and the very wealthy," Paul Ryan, Republican budget whiz kid, won't say.


The ongoing Budget Negotiations stalemate between John Boehner and the Tea Party threatened to shut down the government last week. The feckless Democrats had already agreed to Boehner's original proposal to cut $33 Billion (well, Boehner's proposal was actually $32 Billion, but the Democrats agreed to $33 Billion); they, in fact, settled on $38.5 billion at the 11th hour last Friday night. Democrats complain that every time they move to the middle, the Republicans move further away. Duh, like we haven't seen that before.


Inexplicably, Democrats have at no point even suggested much less proposed rolling back the extensions of the tax cuts on the richest of the rich -- that 1% or 2% of the wealthiest Americans. I did see a report that the President will finally address the tax cut issue this week for that top 1% or 2% of income brackets as a significant way to narrow the budget gap.


So the Big Question of the week was Do Republicans Want to Shut Government Down? I still say, No. They do not want to shut it down; they want to KILL IT; they want to demolish it and stomp on the ruins of the New Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society;they want to strangle it to death and watch the life drain from its corpse;they want its mangled remains burned to ashes and dumped in landfills..... And they want all the $$$ to be given to rich people and big corporations who run things.


So get ready for Hostage Drama #2 of the budget battles as Republicans hold raising the Debt Ceiling hostage to those who don't want the United States to default on its obligations and thrown the world in to a Great Depression of epic proportions.


And maybe I'm wrong, but the Republican plan to lay off a million teachers, police officers, firefighters, public utility workers, highway maintenance workers, public hospital nurses, etc., etc., etc., take hundreds of billions if not trillions of $$$ out of the economy, end unemployment insurance, end social security, end medicare, cut children off medicaid, break all the remaining unions, eliminate collective bargaining rights, lower peoples' wages everywhere, increase taxes on the poor and middle-class, throw people off their health insurance plans, all the while protecting tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and tax-payer subsidized corporations making record profits while paying no taxes and out-sourcing work to China or India, doesn't seem like a good plan to me. I'm just sayin..........



Regards, Bud C