Post-Election Reflections

Sean Hannity lost. Big time.
Big the big mouth continues to blather on.
Is he ever going to get the message?
Shut up ya big dope!
Get off the air!

The people have spoken and they don't agree with Hannity.
He is a loser, the number one Republi-pussy.

He refuses to acknowledge that there are conservative Democrats. He continues to villify all Democrats. He doesn't get it.

Today he says virtually nothing about Rumsfeld's dismissal.

Sean admits to being a broken record. He whines on about what would Regan do? As though Regan were Jesus or something. Earth to Hannity: Reagan is dead and so are Reagan Republicans. Get over it. You are a loser. You lost. Your party lost. Your ideas lost. Your unemployed listeners lost. Bush lost. The evangelicals lost. It is over.

The message was clear: get out of Iraq and get out of Washington.
Will Hannity ever get it?

The mid-term election is over. The people have spoken.
Get out of Iraq and get out of Washington.

How much is a trillion dollars? With 148 million in the workforce, to generate a trillion dollars in tax revenue, it takes only 45 cents per day per employee over a 75 year period (200 work days per year).

Even a $10 trillion Social Security shortfall over 75 years is no more than a pack of cigarettes a day.

Karl Borden provides what is essentially an acid test for any privatization plan. Compare to any plan that Bush produces. This will tell you whether he is really a Republican or a pussy.

Excerpt From the Cato Institute Web site:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/ssps/ssp1.html

Principles for Reform

The only effective means of addressing our Social Security problem is to reduce other government expenditures and develop a new national retirement system based on the financial principles that should apply to any sound retirement program. Those principles may be summarized as follows:

• The system must build a reservoir of financial assets that represents claims against real assets used in the private sector to produce wealth.

• The system must tie individual account balances to retirement benefits so that each retiree's pension is financed by a store of wealth accumulated by that individual's productive contribution to the economy during his or her working lifetime.

• The system must provide individual participants with property rights to the value of their own contributions.

• The system must minimize restrictions on individual participants' making individual decisions regarding the allocation of the capital reservoir to wealth-producing opportunities.

• The system must leave the decision about which financial securities to hold dispersed throughout the economic system in order to maximize the efficiency of market pricing mechanisms.

If it's private accounts you want, open an IRA. It's what they're for - private, personal, Individual Retirement Accounts (now called "Arrangements"). They already exist. They're easy to open, own and manage. We don't need no stinkin' private accounts. We already got 'em. The problem is you're limited as to how much you can put in - far less than you will supposedly be "allowed" to set aside from your half of Social Security.

Why not take the lid off the amount you can contribute to your IRA - both the traditional (pre-tax earnings) and the Roth (after-tax earnings)? That would solve 99% of retirees' needs to save for retirement. They have all of the benefits of Bush's private accounts - and none of the downsides - like you aren't forced to invest in nothing but Social Security bonds - the secret Bush plan to rip off America that I posted yesterday.

But watch out - the next con that's coming? They're going to tax your tax deductible IRA. This will happen by 2010. You read it here first.

Any politician reading this: just remember - there are 70 million baby boomers who vote. You piss them off and your ass is out of Washington - guaranteed. Get your political shit together and maybe they will keep you in office. Screw them and they will screw you for sure. Now go ahead and put your Social Security plan together.

Here is the secret Bush plan that you will not read about anywhere else: what kind of investments do you think you will be "allowed" to invest in with your "personal" govt. owned and controlled "private" account?

Ultimately, only one: social security bonds. Instead of selling these bonds to the Chinese, the Japenese and the Saudis, we're going to sell them to ourselves.

At the end of the day, this is nothing more than a plan to suck up the social security dollars and resell them to clueless boomlet Gen X and Gen Y suckers.

You will pay your tax, "keep" half in your account. The govt will go on spending the social security surplus AND borrow against it at the same time (like taking out a new mortgage every month to pay for each month's mortgage payment and taking that money and getting drunk). Then, you will have the privilege of "investing" in social security bonds that will not pay off until you retire. You will earn really low rates lower than inflation. You will get screwed three times - a con, a bad investment, and you will have to pay taxes on your retirement earnings.

Oh, and it's all funded with a deficit.

George Bush is to money what Clinton was to sex.

I guess he can't win on the ideas alone, PR alone so now he's taken to bribing journalists to say it his way.

What strikes me as most disturbing is not the petty thieves, er, minor league "journalist"/columnists that have been exposed so far. It's the inevitable molten mass below the surface, the Conservative Media Organized Crime Bosses. How much has been paid to Rush Limburger, InSeanHannity, Neil Borscht, Ann Coldhearter, or for that matter, Neutered Gingrich? And, will this bring down Ketchum the way Enron brought down Anderson?

This of course is a distraction that keeps the focus off of journalists who are paid by the CIA, a long time practice, evidently.

Will every newscast, every live remote from the White House, every newspaper column now be preceded or followed with an announcement disclaiming that no funds were received from the government in connection with this report? Or will the disclaimer read that they may have received payments from time to time, much like a stock analyst disclaimer?

In fact, this raises the issue of whether "news analysts" should be regulated the same as stock analysts - by registration and disclosure. There are no ethics on Wall St. and obviously no ethics in PR and among many in the media, so why not? Theives, cheats, frauds and conmen abound in both industries, apparently, so why shouldn't their speech activities be regulated accordingly? I don't like the idea, but then I was in the PR business for 15 years, so why would I? Never bribed a journalist though. Didn't have to - and that's the point.

Fascinating maps developed by the pattern recognition scientists at the University of Michigan provide additional insights into the location, relative weight based on population, and density of Republicans and Democrats throughout the U.S. Look at this cartographic representation of county level election results.

Like MSNBC's purple nation map, this map also shows the blending of red and blue toward purple to illustrate how both parties co-exist throughout most of the nation. When it comes to politics, the pot has clearly melted in large sections of the country.

To my eye, it looks like bands of red surrounding most of U.S. cities. Looks like Rove's suburb/exurb strategy was dead on. So, should Democrats head there too?



Map image © 2004 M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman
Reproduced under Creative Commons license.

If anything is perfectly clear from following the media coverage of the election, it is that the Democrats must get their own mean-spirited, vicious media attack dogs. They were sorely outnumbered by the right wing loud mouths. And they need moderate attack dogs who can stand on their moderate positions while at the same time make extremism itself and the hypocrisy of extremism the issue.

Bascially, they need two fixtures on every network, plus 10 or 20 for their own cable network. I know everybody thinks CNN and MSNBC are the liberal networks, and therefore presumably - at least according to the right wingers - the networks of Democrats. I'm not so sure though that Democrats have as strong an affinity for the liberal media as Shrill O'Reilly, Inshannity and Drug Limbaugh claim.

You don't have to be an extreme right wing idiot with your own talk show to see the folly of the extreme positions of the far left in the Democratic party. Moderate Democrats see it, too. But we also see the extremes on the right side and we don't much like that either. We like even less the Johnny One Note, liberal baiting, liberal hating, pompous, self-rightous, sanctimonious and holier that thou attitude of right wing radio and chicken hawk talk show hosts.

The higher they climb, the farther they fall. At the top of the moderate agenda on both parties should be a take down strategy to neutralize the right wing pansy asses and literally shut them up and shut them down. It's time to knock these turkeys off their bully pulpits. Let's see if they can take it like a man or if they turn out to be the pussy wimps we know they really are.

What should Democrats be doing prior to the next election? I don't mean what should the Democratic Party be doing to win the next time, I mean what should individual Democrats do?

I'll tell you what I, a life long Democrat, moderate on social issues and conservative on the economy, am very tempted to do: switch parties.

But not for the reasons you might suspect.

I'm considering doing so not out of any disgust or dissatisfaction with the Democrats, nor out of a fatalistic sense of "if you can't beat 'em join 'em," and it's not out of any desire to be on the winning side for a change.

I simply mean, screw them - not to hell with them. I mean, let's inseminate them.

I supported Kerry, but I wasn't that enthusiastic about him. The Democrats have certainly prevailed in the past and will certainly prevail again, so I'm not worried about that either.

No. What I propose is to inject some new genetic material into the DNA of the Republican party. In other words, to dilute the purity of the Republican gene pool.

If enough Democrats switch parties, the Republicans will have to shift to more moderate positions and enforce a moderate ideology on their own candidates. Then I wouldn't mind voting Republican no matter which party I belonged to.

You know, on second thought, to hell with them after all. Let's fix the Democratic party, find some decent candidates for 2006 and give them Republican turkeys a run for the money!

Is your record a statement of your accomplishments or merely a petard on which you will inevitably be hoisted during your campaign?

Can't we find candidates who are experienced legislators and who:

a.) Don't have any verifiable scandalous personal behavior in their past
b.) Do have a legislative record that supports their current positions

Where are the conservative, evangelical Democrats and the liberal, gay Republicans? I know it sounds absurd, and looking around today, it's hard to believe there could even be any such thing, and yet there must be somebody out there who falls into these categories. If there are, I certainly hope they organize themselves and manage to find a voice before the 2006 elections.

We know there are plenty of moderates in both parties, although it's hard to actually name more than a handful on the political landscape who proclaim to identify themselves as such. But surely the moderates of both parties when added together constitute a good 80%-90% of America. I hope they organize themselves and find a voice, too.