The Bridge to Somewhere

The Brent Spence Bridge connects Mitch McConnell's state of Kentucky to John Boehner's state of Ohio and both connect to our state of New Hampshire in one very important way, and that is through the great state of mind of Herbert Hoover: Government cannot be the solution.

The bridge carries a stunning percentage of the load of truck traffic from the upper midwest but there are back ups lasting hours as the huge volume of traffic in trucks and passenger vehicles try to squeeze through a structure meant to carry less than an half the traffic it now bears.

Now you would think, well this is a no brainer, build a new bridge or at least expand this one.

Then again, consider the brains of the Republican senator from Kentucky and the Republican Representative, and Speaker of the House, from Ohio.

The people on both sides of the bridge cry out: "Build a bridge," and the Boehner/ McConnell braintrust says, "No taxes."

The people upstream from the bridge, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana say, "We are strangling, build a bridge!" And McConnell/Boehner say, "Government is the problem, not the solution."

"Our businesses are withering on the vine because we cannot get our goods to market," cry the small business people who want the bridge. "We must make government live within its means," say the Republicans.

Now, I suppose you might argue, okay build the damn bridge, without taxes, let the private sector build it.

That's been suggested for roads. Sort of like the railroads--sell the private companies land cheap an let the barons of industry profit. Trouble is bridges for profit mean tolls and the whole idea is to keep traffic flowing, not holding it up, so, in general, bridges tend to be non toll structures. They are things which connect us, and so Democrats like them on an existential basis and Republicans, who are more fond of moats and walled communities and country clubs where the rich can hide from the hoi polloi and not sully their manicured fingernails with the dirt of the land, well, Republicans really don't like bridges much, existentially speaking. They are not bridge builders.

Actually, as in most things, there is symbolism and there is nuance.

When it comes to bridges, even Republicans can sometimes see that government spending may not always be bad. In fact--I cannot believe this story, but it was on the internet so it must be true--Rand Paul is flying to Kentucky on Air Force One with the President, (despite the cost to the Treasury of the airplane feul, )and he says he's doing this to lobby the President to spend some money on building a new bridge.

Imagine that! He says if the President can lobby the "Democrat party" for the funds, he'll lobby the Republicans.

Of course, if I were at the President's elbow I'd whisper into his ear: "Tell him you'll lobby for the bridge if he can say 'The Democratic Party' three times." I mean, the man is asking for help and he still can't bring himself to say Democratic.

These Republicans, once upon a time they could not pronounce "Negro" and said "Nigrah" instead. Now they take great glee in referring to their opponents as "The Democrat Party" rather than the name the Democrats use. These are the same guys who kept calling Muhammed Ali Cassius Clay. They never understood Howard Cosell, when he said, "In this country a man has a right to be called by whatever name he chooses for himself."

But back to the bridge: When Republicans want something, well maybe there is a place for government. But for jobs, the environment, the middle class, healthcare, Social Security: We have to live within our means; No taxes; cut spending is the only answer to jobs, the economy and the deficit.

We are for the private sector, the Republicans say. Let the private sector do it.

But the reality is, when the public sector builds a beltway around Washington, DC, the private sector booms. When the public sector builds a subway and light rail system, wherever a subway station pokes its nose through to the street above, the small business spring up.

If you build it, they will come.

But the Republicans have decided we cannot do anything here in Congress, other than cross our arms and stamp our feet and shout "No!" (Except for bridges in Kentucky.)

No to Medicare, Kelly Ayotte says. It costs too much. No to bridges, if that means spending money.

What ever happened to, "It takes money to make money?"

I guess that's a concept which is a bridge to nowhere.

The Bully Pulpit: The Playground Bullies

Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Perry, are the classic playground bullies. They are, for personal reasons, not entirely sure of their own manhood, so they puff themselves up and spout out the sort of tough sounding stuff which attempts to substitute braggadocio and in your face for real courage. Theirs is a sort of substitute courage, the loud mouth.

And of course, from the time we first got to know him, Barack Obama is the perfect target for the playground bully, who looks for the kid they can wale on,--he so obviously will not hit back.

So, President Obama proposes a jobs bill and McConnell says it's a poor substitute for leadership.

Rick Perry says he never lost sleep over any of the record number of prisoners he's sent to the Texas death house. Why should he? He's a tough guy. Of course, the governor of Illinois stopped executions in his state once he realized through the efforts of the Innocence Project, which revealed, using DNA evidence, the innocence of so many people on death row the governor had to admit, our jury system is so flawed we should not be killing people if there is any doubt at all.

Today a prisoner will be executed even though the witnesses against him have recanted their testimony.

You see a movie like "Conviction" and you see how courts and police make mistakes and would rather than admit it, they'd put an innocent man to death.
Then there's the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who parades prisoners in pink underwear through the streets and some of these guys have not even had their day in court. But the sheriff is a real tough guy. He's real tough when he's surrounded by armed deputies, you understand.
But then, that's the essence of the bully. He is never going to stand across the mat and face off against another man, who could take him down. He's only tough when he's safe, rich and Republican.

Talking Past the GOP: Memo to the WhiteHouse

Okay, I realize the President gets a lot of advice, but this is coming from the state of New Hampshire, so I just know he's going to listen.

Up here, if we don't have a Presidential contender over for coffee more than once, he can forget about getting our vote. What we got up here is retail politics.

So, what can we expect in the way of conversation as the election year begins?

Of course, we will, as Democrats have to point out that the Republicans pushed us over the precipice just before they left office and Obama and the Democrats caught us just before we hit the rocks and splattered all over the bottom in a real honest to goodness Depression.

They got us there through a combination of wars they had no plan for paying for (which they now call Obama's wars) and dismantling regulations and laws which had protected us from the kinds of shenanigans on Wall Street which got us into the last Great Depression, and they saddled us with a huge deficit caused by those wars and by Republican laws to cut taxes for billionaires, which meant we could no longer collect taxes to keep the government running and just for good measure they tried to kill Medicare and Social Security and damn near, well virtually did, kill health care reform.

When we bring all this up, they will say, "I'm for allowing concealed weapons so every citizen can defend himself at school, in the restaurants and bars of his home town, and in his home."

And what can we say to this?

And when the Republican, in the candidate's debate asks the President how he feels about forcing sweet innocent twelve year old girls, who have never had a thought about sex or boys or rock and roll music to have an injection of a vaccine to protect her against HPV virus, and what do you think about that, Mr. President? How do you feel about government mandated injections of twelve year old virgins?

Then you say, "I am not your daughter's physician, and that question is meant to distract everyone from the real issue of jobs, which your party is killing."

And when they reply, "Well, how about gay marriage, how do you feel about that?"

Then the President says, "Gay marriage questions are not about jobs and the only reason you raise the issue is to hide behind it so you don't have to talk about how Republican trickle down economics has killed off jobs."

And when they say, "Well, how do you feel about job killing taxes which shackle job creators and how about regulations which stifle innovation and investment?"

Then the President says, "No taxes ever killed job creation and regulations do not stifle innovation half as much as unfair taxes which make the millionaire's secretary pay more tax, proportionately than the millionaire. What we need is more jobs not richer millionaires. We need to turn unemployed workers into taxpayers; We do not need to turn millionaires into billionaires."

And when they say, "Well, how do you feel about the Death Tax?"

Then you say, Mr. President, "I think families who receive five million dollars are well taken care of, and for estates more than that, well those estates got that big because this country helped create that kind of success and it's time for give back. And we can exempt farmers, by the way."

And when they say, "Your talk about taxing the rich is just class warfare."

Then you say, "The only class warfare I've seen over the past three years has been against the middle class and it's been waged by Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Lindsay Graham leading the charge and every other Republican politician charging behind them."

And when they say, "We've got to get government to live within its means," then you say, "If that means we cannot do anything to get this country moving again, then I'd say, we can acquire the means now and live within them once we have people back to work."

And when they say, "You are part of Washington, and the federal government and that's what's keeping this country and this economy down."

Then you say, "It's not government, or even big government that is the problem. It's bad government that is the problem. And every time the Republicans win an election, which is easier to do if all you have to do is point to the problems rather than to the solutions, every time the Republicans get into office, they drive this country to near ruin. They turn government surpluses into deficits and then blame the Democrats for letting them do it. They are the classic case of the son who kills both his parents and then complains he's been made an orphan."

And when they say, "What about a Mosque at Ground Zero? What about bringing terrorists here to the homeland to have dangerous trials? What about protecting our borders against all those illegal immigrants?"

Then you say, Mr. President: "You're just dodging the real issues, trying to hide behind these social smokescreens, those hot button burn down the barn questions so you can be all self righteous and sanctimonious so you don't have to talk about how we got into this horrible economy and how we can get out."

You can, in fact, say, "You know, for three years, seems like thirty, I've responded to your phony party line talking points, but now I've realized you never had any intention of having a real conversation. All you want to do is to insult, deride, and pose as some sort of savior of the real America. But in fact, you have no idea what the real America is. You live in that part of America only 1 percent of the population knows. And you are bound and determined to protect that 1 percent from the other 99 percent, and that's all you really care about."

And if the Republicans win after that debate, well, at least you can feel better because you know at least everyone has seen them, however briefly for what they really are.

The Dismal Science

When John Boehner gave his speech the the Economic Club of Washington, DC, he distilled the Republican dogma of the last 80 years into the catechism: 1/ The problem is the government 2/ The people, that is the businessmen will lead us out of our economic miseries by creating jobs, innovating and riding on on horseback.

The problem with his economic analysis is the problem with economics, which has been called "The Dismal Science" as a proposition: Economics is not a science at all.

In science, you propose a hypothesis: e.g., Government cannot create jobs. And then you test that hypothesis with an experiment. And then you publish your results so everyone can see how exactly you did your experiment and everyone argues about it until the next trial.

But economics does not have laboratories; about the only things economics has is history (which is one long argument) and mathematical models, which stupefy most people and which lend some credibility to economics as a learned profession, because, after all, they have all those numbers.


The closest thing we've got to a laboratory in economics is an individual state, like say, Michigan, where they can try ideas out and see how they work. Of course, if the idea doesn't work in Michigan, you can say, well that's just an isolated state with all sorts of problems peculiar to Michigan, and just because the idea didn't work there doesn't mean it won't work in say, Texas.

But it's the closest thing we've got to a laboratory.

Now Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan has published her report on how she responded to the economic crisis in that state when she was governor: She cut taxes, cut spending, cut government jobs. And what were the results of her experiment? "We did everything that people would want us to do, and yet it didn't work. Laissez-faire, passivity, tax cuts, hands-off does not work. And, really that's the lesson from this laboratory of democracy which is Michigan."

About the only thing that helped was when the federal government stepped in and bailed out General Motors--which the Republicans in their typically snide, cynical way, immediately dubbed, "Government Motors."

Of course, the Republicans say the reason cutting taxes didn't work was she didn't cut them enough.

Dismal science indeed. Not much science. But pretty dismal.

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism: Rick Perry and the Republican Frontal Assault

The indispensable Gail Collins has a wonderful piece in today's Times about Rick Perry, but she could just as well be writing about Frank Guinta or Kelly Ayotte. She alludes to a piece which appeared in the Texas monthly in which a local observer remarked: "The problem is...that the energy in the Republican Party today is not directed at how to make government work better. It is directed against government." (Italics mine)

Whenever today's leading Republicans think about the federal government it is always as "A sinister force that can be identified as the villain when anything goes wrong."

Collins notes, "More than a quarter of all Texans have no health insurance whatsoever. During the first presidential debate Perry blamed that fact--as he has in the past, back home--on Washington."

The excuse for any failure attributed to the Republican Party is always the federal government.

From Herbert Hoover on, the federal government was seen as grasping to control the "Minds and the souls" of good decent Americans, who would otherwise be hard working and successful, but for the intervention of the feds.

So while America burned, while the bread lines lengthened and the factories emptied and the roads and bridges crumbled during the 1930's, the President and the Congress sat on their hands and told everyone there is nothing the federal government could do. The solution had to be small business and big business had to come to the rescue, as John Boehner has said, "As it always has."

Except when it hasn't.

Capitalism has failed before. In the 1920's and 1930's when the catastrophic failures in Germany and across Europe led to the rise of Hitler and world war.

In America, Franklin Roosevelt was elected President and started spending money and regulating banks and started trying things. And the Republican Party has never forgiven him. And in 1937, he finally was overwhelmed into pulling back on federal spending by the same Republican Party, and the economy went back into a tailspin.

If those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then we are all in deep doo doo.

Obama is no FDR. He doesn't have the fight in him.

Maybe he'll learn and start to channel Harry Truman and start giving the Republican Party what it so richly deserves, which is to say: Hell.

Here's hoping, because we need our government again.

We need to remember Medicare, the Internet, the interstate highway system, the wonders of clean rivers and an untainted food supply, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Coast Guard which rescues more people every year than any Republican governor or senator, the Seal Team Six, which found and killed Osama Bin Laden, and all the other successes of the federal government.

It's no surprise there are stupid, ambitious people out there like Michele Bachmann (who hears a mother blame the HPV vaccine for her child's mental retardation and Michele accepts this as received Gospel) or Rick Perry, who thinks other people are guilty of treason for doing their jobs, whereas he can advocate secession from the union and is not at all treasonous, or Kelly Ayotte who votes to kill Medicare, or Frank Guinta (well, you just pick your quote from that man--anything will do.)

What is puzzling is how idiotic can the voters in this great country of ours can elect these low life and elevate them to national office.

John Boehner: A Herbert Hoover for the 21st Century

Speaking to the Economic Club of Washington, DC Speaker John Boehner sounded for all the world like Rush Limbaugh channeling Herbert Hoover.

First, there was the frank acknowledgment our economy is in trouble.

Then, as Limbaugh and all Republicans are so adept at doing, there is the demonization, the creation of the villain and the bogeyman.

Can you guess who is at fault for our economic woes?

Is it those wild, unregulated Wall Street types, who, out from under any kind of government regulation or scrutiny, sold stocks which were essentially mortgage boondogles, which in turn had been created by even more unscrupulous miscreants who bamboozled ignoramuses into mortgages they had no hope of paying? No.

Is it the Republican Congressmen and Senators who have voted the very rich such enormous tax breaks that billionaire pay less income tax than their secretaries? No.

Is it the European Union which had its economy poisoned by the same stockbrokers and mortgage men who poisoned the US economy? Of course not.

No, it's the GOVERNMENT.

It is most certainly, Mr. Boehner hastens to add, not the innocent, hard working American people (whom the Republicans love and who should love the Repbublicans) or those "job creators," (who the Repbulicans really love) the captains of industry, who would hire lots of people and create jobs if only they were not so terrified of those GOVERNMENT regulators!

"Micromanaging, meddling, manipulating" government bureaucrats (and who doesn't hate bureaucrats?) are getting all up in the faces of God fearing good rich job creators.

The perfect example, Mr. Boehner cites, is Boeing aircraft, which got tired of having to pay a living wage to its union employees in the state of Washington, so they opened a plant in South Carolina, where they don't believe in no commie labor unions, and the federal government, those meddling bureaucrats, had the temerity to charge Boeing with attempted union busting.

Why nothing could have been further from the minds of those Boeing job creators!

It's just that Boeing executives looked around the world and decided making airplanes overseas might not be such good press right now, and so they found the closest thing to Hong Kong they could find right there in South Carolina, where people are so uneducated and desperate and Republican it would never enter their minds to form a union. Why, in South Carolina, they don't even know how to spell UNION. Union has been a dirty word in South Carolina since they fired on Fort Sumter.

Boeing did of course consider Arizona, where they have the Maricopa County re incarnation of the Gestapo hunting down all those illegal immigrants who want to work. And of course, Texas was in the running because in Texas they execute all the troublemakers at such a rate you can hardly keep track. But South Carolina will do just fine, for the job creators, the non union kind of jobs Boeing loves to create.

Mr. Boehner knows the government cannot create jobs: "I can tell you the American people--private sector in particular--are rattled by what this town has done over the last few years."

And what has Washington, DC done? Close to nothing, except argue about the debt ceiling.

Just before the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover sounded the same warnings: "Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of people's souls and thoughts."

John Boehner and Rush Limbaugh have been channeling Hoover ever since.

"No country can squander itself into prosperity on the ruin of its taxpayers," Hoover told us.

So, Hoover sat on his hands, refusing to interject the government into anything, while the country slid into Depression with 25% unemployment, bread lines, massive internal migrations, until enough people were starving and desperate enough to finally understand what horse manure this Republican line amounted to.

They voted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, who said simply, the federal government has to do something when the private sector fails. So he introduced the NRA (National Recovery Act) and a whole alphabet soup of federal government programs, which created "make work jobs," putting people to work building bridges and roads, painting murals, most of which still survive to this day.

The Boehners and Limbaughs of his day all cried this was the end of America, and they were especially outraged over Social Security and they have been trying to kill Social Security and what was left of the New Deal, and trying to kill labor unions and trying to redistribute the wealth from the middle class to the wealthy (with great success) and trying to convince the slow witted American public, ever since, the real villains are those big government, tax and spend, death tax liberal pinko Democrats.

And you have to think of that last scene in Animal Farm, where you look around the room, and you cannot tell the pigs from the rich people who have enough money to control all the animals in the country.

The Tea Party: I Am Become Death

We are still reeling from the epiphany which occurred when Ron Paul was asked at the Tea Party Republican debate what he would do with the 30 year old man who winds up in the hospital, at death's door, without health insurance and the audience, good Tea Party stalwarts all, shouted out, "Let him die!"

That was one of those moments when every day reality, such as I saw daily when I was in training at a city hospital, rubs up against the delusional state induced by people who harbor an absolute Truth which guides every aspect of their life.

If the TRUTH is "Freedom trumps all," including the freedom to die because you were foolish enough to not have a PLAN B for disaster, then your freedom to have no plan, becomes some else's problem.

The problem is actually no longer your problem, when you are comatose. The problem become the problem of the doctors at the hospital when your panicked family brings you in, desperate.

Can the doctor at the hospital say, "Well, actually, he had the freedom to choose not to have health insurance, and he chose that, so now we are going to just let him die" ?

That's the way it happens, time and time again, every day, at every hospital in the land. Lots of tough guys who chose freedom, and their families present the problem to the hospital, which is to say, ultimately, the government.

It's very much the parental role: You have this stupid child who cannot be bothered to be inhibited by caution or prudent planning now you have to pick up the pieces and solve his problem.

Of course, that is much of what motivates members of the Tea Party: They simply do not like their neighbors or even their own family enough to be willing to spend their own money or time or effort to save them from their own fecklessness. The Tea Party faithful loathe welfare because the undeserving poor are helped by taxes coming from the hard working Tea Party folk.

Even if you give them the choice: Okay, you and your parents and your children will be taken care of, but to do this, we will also take care of the unworthy, slothful, shiftless poor who refuse to work, well then the TP folk say, "NO! I'd rather have my parents and children and myself go down the tubes than help those reprobates."

And that's why they hate the mandatory part of the new health insurance bill--because the heedless unworthies will be forced to take care of themselves.

Actually, what really bugs the TP folk is this punctures the fantasy that we can each decide to live off the grid and not be part of the larger community, as we drive down government built roads, talking on government invented internet based phones, across government built bridges, running by clear lakes and streams which were cleaned up by government environmental protection laws after free market private sector industry poisoned the waters.

And those fantasies are so important. Michele Bachmann doesn't want to have young girls vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases because this means we are planning ahead for the day when at least some of those girls will become sexually active (maybe even before marriage, Heaven For fend) or maybe some of those innocent young girls will be virginal at marriage, but their husbands have had sex before marriage and they bring their brides this gift of HPV, which causes cervical cancer which kills the woman Michele thought was too frail, innocent and pure to have a vaccine. And Michele says the vaccine causes mental retardation because some mother in a crowd told her so.

Just how ignorant and clueless is Michele Bachmann?

Oh, there is splendid science. I heard it from the mother. So now it's true and that means, as President, no girls will get the vaccine.

She heard, of course, what she wanted to hear, and she endorsed this fantasy, this nightmare fantasy to support her underlying resentment against premarital sex.

Of course, maybe she was just trying to distinguish herself from Rick Perry, who approved of giving Texas girls this vaccine to prevent them from getting cervical cancer.

But then again, Rick Perry is on record as opposing telling boys about condoms.

So just how enlightened is Rick Perry?

Heaven forbid little boys use condoms, because if they don't use condoms they'll give HPV to little girls who will then die of cervical cancer.

And if these girls do not have health insurance, well they had it coming to them, according to the Tea Party Republicans.

Is this a great party, or what?