Greed, power, and profiteering are so prolific and permeate the very fiber of the Republican Party, absolutely influenced and consulted by the Saudi-Bush business partnerships, and well connected to corporate America today. Its attraction is manifest in the over whelming complicity to bias, deceit, cover-ups, Intelligence manipulations, And most of all on a daily basis Journalist fraud, through, snit, snide, smear, with occasional dignity spread thick to make it seem ok, across the public electromagnetic spectrum.

Where all channel mediums are filled with hatred bias, and long hard relations to immediate changers like Lieberman, and Obama. Here America is witness to extremes at both ends in new and old timers. Lieberman, changes from the Democratic label to support a Republican candidate McCain. Actually, many now think Lieberman was and is a Republican all along and finally came out of the closet. Obama is even more spectacular, now, supporting the Reagan platform which included wild deficits, overspending, and an incredible secret war that Reagan essentially supported Osama Bin Laden. If you ever get chance to read Obama’s book called “Audacity of Hope”, Obama make a momentous statement were “Obama offers no unifying theory of American Government”. A very idiotic statement to say by someone who taught the Constitution and law at the University of Chicago for eight to ten years.

A statement that supports Charles Rangel, when Rangel called Obama stupid about his argument referenced to Martin Luther King, were King needed no help to make the civil right movement practical, meaning it was not necessary to sign into law by President Johnson at the time. Here, we know America is based on laws of the Republic. Yet, whispers of the Anti-Constitutional reasoning is pronounced here by Obama in his book, with a periodic notion that he Obama does not know how to change government, but carries a banner in his campaign “Change you can believe in”. The worry is by both sides, Republican and Democrat is that the seed of Islam buried deep in Obama is now surfacing even though Obama rants that he is a Christian, hard to believe by not completing his conversion to take the leap to a Christian name. It’s as though Obama is on the fence and playing both sides. Who knows Obama may surprise everyone and run on a Republican ticket? The best of all cut and run candidates; here America knows the Republicans have trashed the Constitution ever since they have been in power. They love the Saudi money. As George says “Money Trumps Everything”.

Why aren’t more people talking about Iraq’s effect on the economy? The stimulus “plans” are band aids — what we need is to sew up the sucking chest wound that is W’s misbegotten war. …

Why is it okay to flush a trillion dollars away blowing up the Middle East(and for what?) but it’s a mortal sin to spend a dime helping Americans

Because the Republicans want (to steal a lot of money and) to win the political game here in America forever. They don’t want Democrats to have any success at all. And, their strategy is to nearly bankrupt us, so Dems won’t have any money to ‘play’ with.

Ideas do matter.

If corporations are not checked we will go down the drain for sure.

It’s been said, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”

These days they say the only purpose for a corporation is to make money. And, it’s killing us.

Apparently we need for corporations to do something else or we need to kill them before they kill us. I’d prefer to find some way to evolve into a better Society. I’m squeamish about cash flowing in the streets.

Wall Street profits by currency trading, busting unions and businesses and shipping jobs overseas, and they do it all in the name of Free Trade.

Consider this: you have an economy which we can pretend is a big stack of blocks, tall like a skyscraper.

Someone says we can do better with cheap labor from abroad. So, they take the top blocks off the stack and move them to other countries. They make more profit as expected and tell everybody the economy is doing great. Nobody suspects anything is wrong because “they wouldn’t lie to us”.

Next, they take a few more blocks off the top. There were going to be some new ones added, but those too get sent overseas. The tower gets shorter and yet they say the economy is great. People start to notice the tower is shorter.

At some point the people are expected to make do with the income from the shorter tower and still buy all the goods now being made overseas — the prices haven’t come down sufficiently because the companies want the profits. It becomes harder to buy stuff.

The economy slows a bit and a few prices are reduced. Happy faces all around.

At some point in this process it becomes harder to keep the economy going because the short tower just doesn’t produce enough incomes for American workers, despite fairly cheap prices on the goods now being imported. The economy suffers first where it’s weakest — credit financial markets (which are very sensitive).

When the tower crumbles America suffers mightily and has to rebuild. But, for many Americans the tower has been crumbling block by block for many many years. It’s just the Rich who haven’t really cared because they’ve been profiting from new towers being built overseas. They’ve become foreigners in a sense.

We must regain control of our economy and complete trade restriction isn’t the answer, but some kind of protectionism is inevitable.

Bush is trying to do with the economy what he has already done with Iraq. He creates the mess and then he leaves it for others to deal with after he is gone.

It’s part of the “small government to drown in bathtub” Republican policy which is aimed at preventing a Dem president from doing anything which costs money.

Strangely enough, it might force government to do some positive things just to keep us afloat.

Nora Jones has a song “Everybody hold your breath cause we’re gonna be sinkin’ soon. … in this cheap pontoon.” which sorta describes our situation.

Isn’t it possible that the opening up of this whole new industry could help to ease the blows the economy is taking?

You betcha. That’s why John Edwards includes that in his plans.

Got Leadership?

When the tyrant is frightened & discouraged over what the future holds…. parag*ay you say?

As has been pointed out elsewhere, I don’t think they’re worried about the pending problems. I think they’re worried their timing of it will fall on their watch and not the next president’s (presumably a Dem).

Remember, these dolts only think of themselves.

Because of the R E P U B L I C A N sub-prime mortgage mess. Don’t miss a chance to wrap this tight around the Republicans free market B/S.

Pre Great Depression there wasn’t a politician who would’ve done what FDR did. Even afterward the Republicans preach small government very well and often. But, name for me even one, just one, politician these days who would dare face down a recession or even a flat economy without rushing to the microphone to announce that the government was going to intervene to help business? True Liberalism is gone. The Great Depression woke us up.

What stands now is a governmental system which has very weak methods to handle economic problems. changing interest rates isn’t going to solve most modern recessions.

I don’t recommend any reforms. I haven’t given this issue a lot of thought.

Can you imagine a society which produces everything we need so efficiently and cheaply that only a very small minority of us are needed to work? How would resources be allocated in that kind of Society? Would our current liberalized-free-market capitalism manage it?

Change comes to you. You don’t have to seek it. The question is how you handle it. How do you govern without trying to dominate, own and control the world?

Republicans seem afraid of the world and they seek to dominate it. Democrats are of many kinds.

Hillary wants to manage government and ‘hit the ground running’, but doesn’t really offer a vision of where we’re going and what we’re aiming for. Obama offers unity with Republicans. I’d like something a little more related to how people are supposed to live in this changing world.

Yes, Christy’s had some great Saturday morning threads.

I know my run-on garden-talk here seemed weirdly out-of-place, but it was in response to someone’s question upthread.

Yes. You have some dandy ideas for a post. Christy’s done some good ones which might bear revisiting also while choosing topics.

I was a stay-at-home mom, using the masters degree (biology, Ray, published) to become a pretend subsistence farmer of sorts. Hard to tell how much money we saved but, now that the kids have grown and fledged into their own careers, the whole family enjoys sharing fond memories of the experience. And we still can’t do without that home-grown stuff so the garden, albeit much much smaller now, persists. ;->