Gee, thanks for letting me comment (not).

Thanks for this. I’m going to send it to every Obama-loving supporter I know who is still talking to me.

Now that it appears Romney will get the nomination, I wonder if Obama figures he better cash in before he loses in November. The most recent polling only puts Obama 3-4 points ahead of Romney and this is while the Republicans are battling one another instead of concentrating their attacks on Obama.

While I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Obama in 2008, I never expected this level of betrayal from him. Will his 2012 campaign slogan be “Every campaign promise left behind”?

The “letter” is from the Borowitz Report. Another good one from last October:

http://www.borowitzreport.com/2011/10/17/a-letter-from-goldman-sachs/

The following is a letter released today by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of banking giant Goldman Sachs:

Dear Investor:

Up until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. That does not mean, however, that it has not been very much on our minds. As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests. And we have asked ourselves this question:

How can we make money off them?
…..

The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages. Furthermore, as clashes between police and protesters turn ever more violent, we are making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.

It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say “Let them eat cake.” But at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake futures. We project that through our aggressive market manipulation, the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.

Sustaining elevated levels of environmental damage for oil that will be sent to the Gulf through a 2,147 mile pipeline that cannot be “intensely monitored” due to its length and that will, for the most part, be exported to Asian markets instead of pushing for more funding for public transportation and for R&D on optimizing cleaner energy sources makes so much sense (but only to oil companies, their paid lackeys and victims of fossil fuel industry propaganda).

The Moose Jaw Times-Herald has an article (from 2009 so it is a little old) on the known, possible and expected impact of the continued development of Tar Sands:

http://www.mjtimes.sk.ca/Canada—World/Business/2009-12-10/article-243834/Albertas-oilsands:-well-managed-necessity-or-ecological-disaster%3F/1

“The gaping, smoky open pits often equated with oilsands mines will sprawl across about 500 square kilometres.”

“One U.S. scientist has estimated that those effects (of destroying portions of the surrounding forest) will reduce songbird populations by 166 million birds over the next 30 to 50 years.”

“The Alberta Cancer Board has found cancer rates about 30 per cent higher than anticipated in the downstream community of Fort Chipewyan, with blood and lymphatic cancers double the expected rate. The board didn’t consider possible causes.”

“The oilsands use a lot of water and much of it ends up in vast tailings ponds, which are now the size of the city of Vancouver, and they’re growing. The ponds are toxic. About 1,600 ducks tried to land in one last year and most died, covered in oily sludge. The ponds are separated in some places from the Athabasca River only by large earthen dams. One study suggests that up to 11 million litres of tailings leak out every year”

Since these quotes are from 2009, I expect that those tailings ponds are quite a bit larger.

But ..but Russ Feingold, who was the Democratic poster child for campaign funding reform and civil liberties and who is now one of the Obama campaign’s co-chairs, thinks that aside from the Big Money thing, the Obama presidency has just been short of great. Sure, he thinks that Obama taking Big Money from PACs is a bad thing, but hey, there’s this:

“I mean, can you imagine how happy the Republicans had been if they had had the president that got Osama bin Laden, al-Awlaki and Gaddafi out of power? He’s fine on that.”

“The question there is, is there a doctrine where if somebody is an American citizen and they are clearly affiliated with an enemy power and it is impossible to get them—if that’s true, and that’s what I don’t know—if it’s impossible to get them any other way, is it justified? I would say, probably.”

If you can stand catapulting the propaganda without throwing up a little, his interview with an abnormally complacent Amy Goodman is on the DN site. I don’t know how Amy can look at herself in the mirror after this interview and her piece in The Guardian.

Great news for Obama, not so great for the rest of us. I see BO just signed the bill allowing for the two-month extension of the very bad idea tax “cut” (notice that it’s no longer referred to as a “holiday” and any effort to allow it to revert will no doubt be tagged a tax increase). Now BO is being “forced” to make a decision on Keystone within two months. Then, when another extension is required, there will be another odious requirement attached to which BO will “acquiesce” (i.e., doing what he wanted to do but now with the cover of the evil Republicans making him do it).

The extension of the payroll tax cut will not create jobs or give a whole lot of help to working people but it will set up Social Security for future dismantling. It’s a gimmick designed for the 2012 elections by the Democrats who think this will help them win. It might just backfire.

I just received an email from my Republican senator (I have to agree to accept his emails if I want to send him pre-fab emails from any organizations). In it, there was a poll about the payroll tax cut but before the poll there was this:

Social Security provides peace of mind to over 40 million American seniors. Since its creation under President Roosevelt, Social Security has been funded through the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA). Social Security is not a welfare program. It is a retirement security program funded by contributions from each American worker to support senior citizens who met their Social Security obligations when they were asked to contribute to the system.

Of course, I know that, as a Republican, he’s itching to destroy SS. That doesn’t negate his point about Social Security being a program for workers financed by workers. I do know that his own poll had about 84% agreeing with him. My formerly popular Democratic senator is currently polling at 47% approval with 44% disapproval and this is in a pretty blue state.

It does undermine social security because it eliminates the self financing mechanism and changes it to a welfare program.

This is a blatant attempt at ‘good cop;bad cop’ … They played us then, and they are trying to
play us now.

Yes – entirely agree.

Correction: proper quote: “Let’s be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil”

This is very depressing news. I expected the young to hold Obama to his campaign promises. Seems as if they buy the lines that the Republicans are obstructing him, that they obstructed him during the first two years of his presidency when the Democrats held both houses of Congress and the then very popular BO could have very effectively used the bully pulpit for rallying public support of pending legislation, that his invasion of Libya was made for a reason other than to control that country’s wealth, that he couldn’t close Gitmo, that he must prosecute whistle blowers because they endanger rather than help, etc. Don’t they remember when candidate Obama said he would free the U.S. from the “tyranny of oil”? And now he won’t even rule out the Tar Sands project. I really thought they were smarter than this.

My son is young and he cannot abide BO. Of course, he couldn’t stand him in 2008 either. Rather than Paul, he would support someone who actually acted like a Democrat of old. He understands the need for social safety nets and the lie of the “free” market.

Back from the days when George was trying to take an ax to Social Security and the Dems were screaming:

“Between 1959 and 1974, the elderly poverty rate fell from 35 percent to 15 percent. This was largely attributable to a set of increases in Social Security benefits. The elderly poverty rate has continued to decline in subsequent decades, reaching 9.4 percent in 2006. Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits continue to play a key role in reducing elderly poverty, especially among women and people of color. If Social Security benefits did not exist, an estimated 44 percent of the elderly would be poor today, assuming no changes in behavior.”

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/07/elderly_poverty.html

An oldie but a goodie:

“The authors estimate that a $1,000 increase in Social Security benefits is associated with a 2 to 3 percentage point reduction in poverty rates for elderly households. They also find no statistically significant effect of benefits on income inequality, suggesting that higher-income and lower-income elderly benefit similarly from increases in Social Security.”

http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html

Any statement that Social Security does not benefit the elderly and society as a whole is completely inane.