01-08-09
- Obama wants to tackle Social Security and Medicare but doesn't signal how (nyt) -- except to say in his presser that it's going to be tough getting back on track and everyone's going to have to shoulder some of the burden. I have an idea for you President Obama: get rid of the $102,000 cut-off in income for social security deductions. That one step alone would increase the Social Security Trust Fund enough to keep it healthy for 75 years. Sounds too much like taxing the rich? Yeah, I guess, and the tax code has been so tough on the rich for so long. A second very profitable step would be to trim back some of our 737 military bases scattered around the world protecting our "national interests." Other countries seem to prosper without such military empires. But be careful if you try this, so they don't pull a JFK on you too.
- Glad to see that Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz agrees with me on one of my major premises regarding Obama's incredibly shrinking stimulus plan. See my 1-5-09 entry (Two-Thirds of US Companies . . .)
- Obama team as arrogant as Bill Clinton's was: Howard Dean told not to attend Obama presser with new DNC Chair Tim Kaine (huffingtonpost). Oh brother! How much national and loyalist goodwill are these mirror-gazers going to throw away before reality knocks them flat on their fannies?
- Rick Warren sidekick demanded that all gays be arrested, published names of gays in Uganda (americablog) (thesmirkingchimp) (maxblumenthal). Damnable evidence of Warren's unworthiness to hold any spot in the inauguration at all. Does Obama accept this for the sake of sucking up to bigots for their votes? Is this the change we can believe in? It sounds like the worst of George Bush's pals in the evangenital hate-a-gay club.
- Seattle Gay Bars Receive Threatening Letters From Domestic Terrorist (slog). People are not born to hate gays or anyone else. They are TAUGHT to hate by a vicious weekly litany of preaching by an army of "God's soldiers", and by the pernicious influence of that cancerous religious hatred that has permeated the entire culture for so long. So-called biblical literalists who cherry-pick which commands to include in their litany and which to ignore in their own lives constantly hurl a barrage of condemnation and abhorrence--"against the sin of homosexuality," mind you, "not against the sinner," they innocently proclaim in the same breath. Other bigot groups, not so hypocritically circumspect, unabashedly attack gays from their bully pulpits, books and other member communications while seldom neglecting to plead for more money to help fight the abominable gay lifestyle choice. Rick Warren, Barack Obama's pick to symbolically set the tone of the inaugural ceremonies and therefore of President Obama's administration of "change you can believe in," is but the latest example of homophobic hate-mongers cloaked in the self-righteous raiment of lying, intolerant, self-serving religious intolerance. Ignorant believers and non-believers alike, morally contorted and deformed by this constant barrage of viciousness, all too often feel it their right to take it directly to the "enemy", physically attacking and sometimes murdering gays--or even people they merely think are gay. Folks, this is what you get when you have government that tolerates and even encourages such bigotry, as the US has done for years -- governments the world over that are obsessed with their own "national interests" rather than with what is right and humane. This is but one more example of the human race as a failed species, racing headlong on a course toward its own destruction. With such breathless ignorance as these religious and government leaders manifest, how could mankind ever possibly adequately address in time the larger problem of global warming, for example, which will probably extinguish most life forms on the planet within one or two hundred years--if that long?
- NGC 2736: The Pencil Nebula (apod)
