News & Articles

Should there be a sanity test for Congress critters?

What a show the goofily-fanatical tea party Republicans are putting on in Washington! First, they threw a group hissy fit to force a costly, embarrassing, and entirely-unwarranted shutdown of the national government of our USofA. That was strange enough, but then a gaggle of the goofballs cranked their shtick all the way up to code-red bizarre by throwing a series of staged tantrums when they learned that the government they had shut down was, in fact, shut down.
I know you don’t have to be smart or logical to be in Congress, but surely a lawmaker ought to be more tightly-wrapped than this bunch. One thing that really worked them into a shrieking frenzy was that national parks and monuments were closed. This led to the spectacle of a House committee hauling in the director of national parks to berate him mercilessly for five hours, demanding to know why the parks were closed. He should’ve just held up a mirror, but – like the good career park ranger he is – Director Jon Jarvis patiently tried to explain the obvious to the congress critters in front of him: They had voted to shutter the federal government; national parks are a part of the government; Congress took away the money to staff the nation’s 401 parks and monuments; so they were closed. But the rabid solons effectively shouted at him: “Stop making sense!” One doofus named Doc Hastings even invented his own facts, blathering that in the government shutdown back in the mid-nineties, parks stayed open. Sorry, Doc, but no – the Lincoln Memorial, Statue of Liberty, Grand Canyon and others all across the country were closed. By the way, guess who has been steadily whacking funding for park service staff and maintenance of those national treasures? Right – the same loony-tunes ideologues running this absurd circus.

“Why the national parks were closed,” The Washington Post,” October 18, 2013.

Why are we subsidizing McDonald’s?

Let us all now bow before the god of free enterprise, whose awesomeness was revealed in a recent news release announcing that the divine managers of fast-food demi-god McDonald’s achieved a profit of $1.5 billion in just three months this summer.
Holy Big Mac! How did it do that? Peek behind the curtain and you’ll see that McDonald’s secret power is thee and me – America’s taxpayers. The corporation rips off its huge workforce by paying poverty wages and no benefits, then directs the workers to the food stamp office and other government-funded safety-net programs.
Neat, huh? A major chunk of the chain’s cost-of-doing-business disappears from the corporate books and – shazam! – reappears on the government’s books. In fact, the National Employment Law Project reports that McDonald’s phenomenal $1.5 billion profit is bloated by an estimated $1.2 billion that we taxpayers will shell out this year to support its predatory wage-and-benefit policy. Aren’t you “lovin’ it,” as the chain’s ads say?
But the golden arches are not alone in this fast-food flimflam. The conglomerate owner of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell duns us for $648 million to underwrite its poverty pay. Subway burrows into us for $436 million. Burger King, (a British outfit) taps us for $356 million, little sweet Wendy’s grabs more than a quarter-billion bucks from us, and Dunkin’ Donuts dips into our pockets for $274 million.
And look here – it’s Domino’s pizza, whose extremist right-wing owner says he hates government spending. But he’s picking taxpayers’ pockets to the tune of $126 million to subsidize his “free” enterprise. These corporate powers piously preach about the “magic” of the marketplace, but as these facts reveal, magicians don’t do magic – they perform illusions.
“McDonald’s Billion-Dollar Profit is Awkwardly Close To The Amount It Costs Taxpayers Every Year,” www.huffingtonpost.com, October 21, 2013.

Cruzing to the White House?

One of the stupidest bits of conventional wisdom popping out of Washington these days is that, whatever opinion you have about far-right tea party extremist Ted Cruz, you have to concede that he’s “smart.” Really? Bull-goose goofiness and reckless self-absorption is smart? After all smart is as smart does, and plenty of hot shots with big IQs have turned out to be seriously stupid – not to mention narcissistic, ridiculous, delusional, destructive, corrupt, psychopathic, and criminal. Take Joe McCarthy, Al Capone, Richard Nixon, Bernie Madoff, the Koch brothers... and now down to Ted. Not only has Cruz mounted a maniacal crusade to kill Obamacare at all costs, but he sees himself as monumentally heroic, even asserting that his recent petulant shutdown of our nation’s government was the moral equivalent of the people who fought in World War II to stop Hitler. Wow – that is grandiosely stupid!
Moreover, Cruz splattered his vainglorious stupidity all over his own party. We’re now seeing the spectacle of GOP lawmakers bellowing like crazy Cruzites, openly declaring their best idea on healthcare reform – indeed their only idea – is to kill reform. I can hardly wait for their 2014 campaign ads: “Hi, I’m Congressman Goober, and I’ve been fighting ferociously in Washington to keep you and your family from getting the health care you need. Remember, vote for the Goober.” Cruz, of course, can’t even see his stupidity, for the tea party fringe has lifted him high atop its national political pedestal, dazzling him with impassioned pleas to run for president. However, it would be smart of Ted to recall that this same wobbly pedestal was most recently occupied by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Donnie Trump – all of whom were also legends in their own minds.

 “GOP sees promise in health site woes,” Austin American Statesman, October 26, 2013 “Maybe we should ask Putin how to fix mess in Congress,” Austin American Statesman, September 27, 2013.