This is what I found out today from Republican callers to a radio program I listen to.

The Democratic party should be incorrectly referred to as the "Democrat" party. The party itself was infiltrated by communists in the 60's and 70's and now represents a anti-capitalistic, corporation hating bunch of whiners.

Communism means you want the government to do everything for you and involves government meddling on social issues.

Islamo nazi fascists were taking over the world until George W. Bush bravely stepped up to the plate and took the war to the home of the enemy. We are now defeating the enemy everywhere.

The lies the government spewed about Iraq and Al Quaeda (and everything else) are meant to help the citizens accept decisions that are made by people who know more about the dangerous world we live in than we do.

I feel so vastly informed and educated now.

I apologize for the month long absence. Well, actually I'm more disappointed than I am sorry. Gasp, so the 20 or so of you who might read this have been expunged from responsibility.

I was overwhelmed by a lot of things, most of which I am not going to quantify - - and baseball season allows me to have an escape. Believe me there have been plenty of things to write (type) about. I have just not been up to the task lately.

I will soon return. Y'all take it easy.

Some pyromaniac lights a match and suddenly everyone is screaming "fire,fire,fire"

... the fire department is called, the military is put on alert, and the ambulances are requested ...

Then everyone shows up to the scene to find that the match is now just a burnt husk of a once sulphur-dipped stick.

Reminds me of those bugs that fly around the street lights, always flying into the street light only to get zapped for some reason. I always wondered why those bugs kept flying into the light to get zapped. I mean, didn't they see their friends fly into the lamp and get zapped? Did they think it was some sort of awesome hallucinatory drug that they were missing out on?

I am sick and tired of people ignorantly trying to push the falsehood that Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco botched the Katrina disaster. Nagin and Blanco did not fuck up on Katrina.

You can read my own archives on this starting with September of 2005.

The Bush administration and its incompetent appointed political hacks did. Nagin and Blanco were at the conferences where everything was laid out both vocally and in writing what was needed to do, but the administration failed on every single count.

Blanco issued a formal declaration for a state of emergency 2 days before the hurricane hit. So why did Chertoff wait until 2 days after (late Tuesday) to formally involve the Federal government? And when Bush signed this document, how come EVERY SINGLE PARISH NORTH AND SOUTH OF LAKE PONTCHATRAIN was not on the document?

Chertoff and Michael Brown told Amtrak that they didn't need to evacuate people via the trains. They turned away Greyhound buses and told Blanco and Nagin that there was no need to use City Buses and School buses. That's right. Blanco and Nagin were going to gather the buses but Michael Brown told them don't bother because they were sending in greyhounds. What happened? Well, the private firm that got the contract from FEMA to get the greyhounds decided to sit around and wait, that way they didn't spend any money and could get the most amount of profit from the FEMA contract.

FEMA did not contact the Red Cross or set up food and shelter stations. FEMA turned away shipments of ice and water from Walmart. These are not the responsibilities of the local government in a Federal disaster area. FEMA is the central command center.

The US Navy had two ships offshore that waited 3 days doing nothing BECAUSE THEY WERE NOT FORMALLY AUTHORIZED by the President. That's what the officer himself said by the way.

FEMA officials did not bring in radio equipment and gave conflicting signals to Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco about what was going on. At the conference calls with Chertoff and Michael Brown (all this is on record by the way) they would agree on what to do and set a timeline, but then not follow through or completely change course without letting anyone know.

The federal government of cronies and incompetents are to blame. Period.

This is from my friend Chris:

Everything you think you own is borrowed from foreign countries, and they will eventually come to collect, and when they do, your fancy job, fancy car, and whatever else you hold dear will dissappear. cause you see, since the reagan years, we have what is called a trade debt, a national debt, and personal debt. when china and the other foreign countries we owe decide they will no longer fund our debt, guess what, they will just come over and take what is rightfully theirs. so prepare to become indentured servants and for your children to become slaves cause that's what the reagan and bush administrations have afforded you, and they've played you like a fiddle in the process. so enjoy your "fantasy baseball" and your "fantasy world" in general cause when you get old and your children are broke and begging in the streets, you will be too old and senile to even know what's happening to you when they decide to pull the plug on your ass to free up what little cash they can ge their hands on.

reality check yourselves.

The student loan program is a subsidy to the banking industry. what? Yep, it's true.

Let me explain.

You see, every student loan made is a "guaranteed student loan." That means the government pays for the loan, in case you didn't know. The financial institution arranges the loan, than sells the loan to the government, and collects the receipts.

That essentially means that instead of just giving the money directly to the students, the government makes the students fill out paperwork to get an 8 per cent loan from a private bank. The private bank takes no risk because the government is buying the loans. The profits from the loan go to the private bank however.

So, you spend X dollars, get an X dollar refund, and then -- despite spending a net zero dollars -- receive monthly checks from students repaying their student loans.

Those students spend 10 to 15 years repaying their loans, enriching the banking firms. Had the students been given the money outright, they would have had more money to spend during those 10 to 15 years. Instead, this potential cash gets alloted to the banking industry.

Investment in student education is important in any society, but to make that investment in a way which enhances private interests while putting young people in debt servitude isn't the most efficient method of investment in education. It doesn't make sense to have wealth or lack thereof become the determinant of a quality education. Rather then subsidizing the banking industry, investment in the education of youth should be without strings attached.

The problem in the United States has been that education's historical development was due to a combination of private and public efforts. The importance of education is so paramount that the private sector will be able to accrue a niche in the absence of a state educational system. The problem when the private sector becomes the provider, however, is that education becomes segregated by wealth, thus fostering the neverending massive efforts to create forms of public education during the last 150 years.

You know it amazes me how the self-appointed (self) right (eous) declares me some sort of "liberal " or "Democratic" opposition, without knowing anything about me, merely making those assumptions because they receive legitimate intelligent criticism.

Uh, dumb-asses, Republican Teddy Roosevelt bolted his party because he thought it was corrupted. Abraham Lincoln was deeply concerned about the infiltration of financial shysters into the Republican party during the Civil War -- in fact one of the suspected reasons for his assassination is that he intended to pull the reigns in upon large corporatization of finance that he felt would eventually take away the freedom of small businesses. And he would know, he was railroad lawyer for nearly 20 years before he became a politician in the 1850's.

Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation of about the dangers of collusion between defense contractors, the military, and large financial interests in his fairwell speech in 1961. The current list of Republicans disgusted by the Bush gangsters is growing.

Oh but I suppose that when you brain is constantly spoonfed by liars and misinformation you wouldn't realize truth if it surrounded you like a plastic bag.

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. "

-- George W. Bush, speaking off the cuff to a fake town meeting in 2005. [SOURCE]

TRANSLATION: You see, we have to lie, because if we ever told the people the truth of our real intentions, they would send us all to maximum security prisons for a hundred years.

The difference between the left and right is not what the self-proclaimed right thinks.

The difference is that there is no left or right. Those words are used and tossed about like they have meaning in and of themselves, but they are just microscopic non-entities that negate anything meaningful that might come out of anyone's mouth.

There are people who march in the parades sponsored by the governing elites, who imbibe senselessly the propaganda monitored and paid for by those who mind the interests of those who own the economic hierarchy. Such people are innocently duped for various reasons, but nevertheless they still mouth the words and images that find their way into their rationales, unable to combat the disingenuious lies and fables that gather on their sense of pride.

Others see the gathering storm clouds on the economic horizon, loathing the pitiful small-minded power-trips, pompous assertions, and foolish decisions made by governing elites. These people react in many different ways, but mostly with the idea of doing the right thing, and making the best decisions. Now these ideas are common to almost everyone regardless of stripes, however when you see through lies and understand the actual truth in the history of events, you can be accused of some quite ridiculous meaningless things.

And damn, when you lie your way into making a huge mistake, and then blame your critics for all the wrath which follows after the critics tried to warn you of the wrath that did follow ... what can you say. You tried to crawl across the interstate highway, and when you got run over by a truck, don't sit in the hospital and blame those nay-sayers who told you long before that your gonna get hit by a truck, especially when building a damn bridge across the highway would have been a better idea. But stupid pride and vainglorious mentalities will insist upon their perfumed stupidity while proclaiming superior intellectual credentials -- even if they have to forge those credentials.

We are wasting time pounding on these things called left and right. As corporate forms of aristocratic wealth gradually carve out the land, sending jobs to countries that have virtual slave-labor, bankrupting the middle class, and destroying this government "of, by, and for the people" -- there will only be three types people soon enough : the super-rich, their high-paid servants, and the poor.

Okay here's the reason relying on "personal savings accounts" for anything is bad social policy.

A person who saves $100 a month for 20 years at 3% annual interest will have only $32,830 if no withdrawals occur. If the average rate of inflation for 20 years is 2% (big low end assumption, the value of that $32,830 in today's terms would be only $21,917.

Mind you this is meant to cover the medical expenses or retirement fund of the elderly. The average catastrophic hospital visit is more than $30,000. Also, a person who withdrew $800 a month from the built-up $32,830 account, could do so for only 3.61 years before the account is exhausted.

Now a person who saves $200 a month over the same 20 year period, will have $65,000. Still expecting citizens to have enough left over at the end of the month to save is rather foolish expectation of the social system. The more efficient system is to nationalize retirement and health care, and have every single citizen pay a small amount into the system. The burdens of financing retirement and health care should not be placed on the individual or the company, because the costs are too unmanageable and the inevitable end result is larger expenses than would be the case if the system was nationalized.

This idea is not "communistic." The financing comes from everyone, but no goverment is owning the means of production. The government merely pays the bills from the fund, and audits the costs. It is the same idea as a credit union. If all citizens were in the same system, the payment and costs of these two essential elements of society -- old age and health care -- would be more efficiently managed and beneficial for businesses and individuals.

It's really that simple. The arguments to the contrary are either financed by the insurance monolith, or they indicate an inflexibility when it comes to the dualism between private and public economics. Private economics will not always have the public interest in mind when the desire is to make a buck. The assumption that it is in the best interest of private economics to provide quality service has been shown to be a historically inadequate expectation. Sometimes the people, in the form of public economics, have to take part in their own best interest, because the private interests won't be able to see beyond a short-term fixation with profit. Sometimes decisions have to be made for society as a whole.