Torture and the Czars

On the news last night some of John Yoo's so called legal opinions for the Bush administration were starting to come out. I would first like to thank Dick Cheney for pushing to have the so called torture memos brought out into the open. These memos will just show how close this country was to having a dictator for a president. We will finally get to see just what types of lunatics we were dealing with in the Bush administration. Anyway, John Yoo was one of the attorneys that Bush relied upon to write legal opinions so that he could justify doing whatever the hell he wanted to do, to fit his twisted agenda. John Yoo could be heard talking about getting information by bringing in a prisoners child and stomping on the child's testicles in front of his father. That father in my humble opinion will say anything the people interrogating him want to hear just to save his son any agony and any father would do the same. It gets better. He then says that the President had the right to order a village of civilians to be exterminated. This is sick and the worst part is that President Cheney and Vice President Bush (that was not a typo) agreed to it. This coming from two draft dodgers of the Viet Nam war. The question is what kind of people would consider such acts. I thought this was the USA. I thought we were above that. Maybe I am just a simple person, but I do know that the terrorists have achieved some of their goals by turning our leaders into raging lunatics with delusional paranoia to even think of stuff like that. There are better ways to protect our country. Oh and the czars that we have in our government. One of my neighbors who considers himself a conservative but was behind Bush 100 percent, even though William Buckley the father of modern conservatism said that Bush was anything but conservative, keeps forwarding me emails. I have asked him to research for himself some of the things he sends but he just keeps drinking the Kool Aid and has no opinion of his own. Anyways the latest is about all the czars in the Obama administration. Some one needs to tell him that it was Bush, who increased the size of government more then any president in history. When Clinton left office he had only 7 czars. His predecessor George H.W. Bush had only 2. But along came his son G.W. Bush and he increased it to 35 czars. My friend you need to start screening the email sent to you by doing a little fact checking before forwarding it to me. I know your conservative but being conservative does not mean following the party lines because our government including both Republicans and Democrats are anything but conservative, and the Democrats don't claim to be.

The Economy and Taxes

My wife and I just returned from a weeks vacation that was bones basic for food and lodging due to our reduced income. Not asking you to feel sorry because we do realize that we are lucky to be in our homes and not behind in bills and are fortunate enough to get away. Anyway we spent Super Bowl weekend in Vegas to become the Godparents of our nephew Anthony Michael and after to watch the Super Bowl. From there we flew all night to Negril Jamaica for four days of thawing out my bones. One thing I noticed in both places is how down the tourism is. The economy sucks and the people in tourist areas are really feeling it. For example we paid 72 dollars a night for a hotel right on Negril Beach. This is the middle of high season and the room should be going for much higher than that. The picture of me shows just how dead the beach is. So lets examine where we are now. The Republicans just had their national convention in Hawaii, which is ironic due to the fact that every time Obama goes there for vacation, he is blasted for being out of touch with mainstream America by going to such an exotic locale, by the same Republican pundits who were at the convention. This leads me to the so called Bush tax cuts which would supposedly trickle down to create jobs. If that's the case then why is unemployment so high? The Republicans on Fox News would have you think that all the problems started after Obama took office. Make no mistake about it because the facts are this. Our country is in debt due to massive government spending under Bush and continued spending by Obama. Bush presided over the largest increase in government in history by starting two wars, Medicare Part D, and No Child Left Behind just to name a few. All unfunded. All while giving tax breaks to millions of Americans. And Obama is following the same path. But you and most people have been tricked into thinking that you got the tax breaks. Not true. The fact is that the richest 1 percent is who got the pie and the other 99 percent of the people in this country have to share the crumbs. Bush claimed that 92 million taxpayers would on average get a savings of 1083 dollars a year when his cuts were fully implemented in 2010. The key word is average. In reality most Americans are getting around 220 dollars per year, while the people who make over a million dollars a year are receiving around 90 thousand dollars a year in tax cuts. How many people make a million a year? Put in simpler terms if Bill Gates who is worth around forty billion dollars walks into a bar where there are three other workers who each have a net worth of lets say a hundred thousand dollars, that means the average net worth of the four people in the bar is around ten billion dollars each. A true statistic, but not an accurate statistic. What is worse is all this talk about the socialized programs that Obama is proposing coming out of Republicans mouths. The Bush tax cuts gave big business so much money back, that between 2001 and 2003 there were 82 companies that that had profits totalling over a hundred billion dollars yet paid no federal tax at all. Zero. And to make matters worse, on April 15th these same companies were given tax rebate checks totalling 12.6 billion dollars. And people think its the spending that is leading this country into a bankruptcy. Wake up people. This country is in debt because of tax cuts to the richest one percent. So the next time you here a Republican spouting about income redistribution, by citing a person in need, getting money from the government while paying nothing into it must realize that's what is happening with big business also. We are subsidizing big business. Only instead of creating jobs, they have shipped them overseas.