Be INFORMED

Friday, January 20, 2012

Saturday Satire: Those Darn Republicans

  Rick Perry is out of the running as is Jon Huntsman. All who remain are the Republican professional clowns, Mitten and Newtie.

Jay Leno: "Mitt Romney is coming under fire because even though he is a multimillionaire, he only paid 15 percent in taxes. That's not a tax, that's barely a tip."

"Mitt Romney, whose father was born in Mexico, is now talking up his Mexican heritage. Not to be outdone today, Newt Gingrich said he once cheated on one of his wives with a woman named Juanita."

"Sen. John McCain told Sean Hannity that choosing Sarah Palin was still the best decision he ever made. Well, today the Arizona DMV took away his driver's license."

"According to the exit polls, Mitt Romney won in every category of voter in New Hampshire, from rich to poor, from young to old, from white to really white. He won across the board."

"Researchers found a frog in new guinea that is so tiny, they believe it's the smallest vertebrate on the planet. It has the tiniest backbone of any living creature, except members of Congress."

"A new poll says 84% of Americans disapprove of Congress' job. The other 16% weren't aware Congress was doing one."

David Letterman: "Mitt Romney is quite a guy. At one point he and his wife bought a zoo and fired all the animals."

"Newt Gingrich says that on Thursday he will be releasing his tax returns. You can feel the excitement, right?"

David Letterman's "Top Ten Signs Mitt Romney Is Getting Cocky"
10. Answers all questions with, "So's your mother"
9. Offered Santorum a 10,000-vote head start in South Carolina primary
8. He's forwarding his mail to the White House — Wow, that's cocky
7. Skipping next three primaries to go on tour with Young Jeezy
6. Started selling his own commemorative presidential plates on QVC
5. Donated $50,000 to Rick Perry's campaign
4. Now spelling "Mittt" with three T's
3. Ended debate by taking out wad of bills and "making it rain"
2. Wants to rename states Mittchigan, Mittsouri, Mittsissippi, and New Mittsico
1. Offered to help Newt with his concession speech

David Letterman's "Top Ten Things People Said When They Heard Jon Huntsman Was Dropping Out Of The Presidential Race"

10. "Who's Jon Huntsman?"
9. "Is he the rich boring white guy, or the other rich boring white guy?"
8. "Seriously, who's Jon Huntsman?"
7. "You mean my tax attorney? Oh wait, that's Stan Huntsman"
6. "Does this mean we can bring Herman Cain back? That guy was hilarious"
5. "So that leaves only four viable candidates, plus Rick Perry"
4. "It's like Jon Huntsman said . . . Well, actually, I have no idea what he said"
3. "Hey honey, some guy I’ve never heard of is dropping out of the race"
2. "He should have Tebowed more"
1. "Now who's gonna lose to Obama in the general election?"

More Privatization Legislation In Florida, Republican Style

    So once again the corrupt, Republican controlled Legislature is up to it’s eyeballs in trying to hide a bill from the Florida public.

    The Republican corporate servants want to pass a bill (  SPB 7170 ) that would allow for some state agencies to be privatized in secret. 

    There is also another bill ( SPB 7172 ) which would allow the privatization of correctional facilities throughout a pretty large swath of south Florida ( 18 counties ).

Florida Today notes:

The Senate rules committee will take up the bill (PCB 7170) at today’s afternoon meeting. The bill essentially means that an agency would not have to report its privatization of a program or service until after the contract is signed.

Open government advocates say the bill would keep the public in the dark about the costs of outsourcing government services. But proponents counter that the measure requires any privatization deal to first offer “a substantial savings” to the state.

   Also, from the Orlando Sentinel:

The Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, gave the go ahead for the Senate to take up legislation that would privatize correctional facilities in an 18-county South Florida region and also a bill that revises requirements for the privatization process. The second piece of legislation would drop a requirement that departments looking at privatization create a business case for privatization prior to the Legislature making the decision.

   Oh yes, another attempt by the corporate legislature to put one past the residents of Florida, who really should get off of their asses and takes these crooks like Thrasher to task for fixing something which is not broken.

    In case you have not notice in the past, most of the privatization in the state of Florida or elsewhere usually ends up costing the taxpayer more money, not less. This scam will be no different.

    What happened to the open records law that Florida government is always boasting about? Telling the public after the fact is not very transparent, and this sort of shit only happens when the parties involved have something to hide.

SOPA, The MPAA and Chris Dodd

By Hunter  for Daily Kos on Wed Jan 18, 2012

For as long as I can remember, the MPAA (that's Motion Picture Association of America) has labored hard in their effort to be the most universally reviled industry group in the country. They are in stiff competition with the music business, but still manage to hold their own. What makes both these groups special is their ability to treat absolutely everyone like dirt: directors, actors, artists, distributers, consumers, everyone. To hear the MPAA tell it, the entire world revolves around a handful of companies whose content comes to them via magical pixie delivery service, the only talent that exists in the world is Studio Head, and everyone else from actors to consumers to the person playing bass guitar is a filthy, valueless leech only tolerated because slavery is still technically prohibited (for now). My own expectation is that there's something in the water, but in any event, in order to work there you have to be a raging, insufferable asshole with a titanic ego and no apparent skills other than raw parasitism.

Enter former Sen. Chris Dodd.

As Markos already mentioned, the only substantial response from the MPAA to the SOPA/PIPA internet blackout has come in the form of a profoundly pompous statement penned by Chris Dodd, or at least penned by an army of soulless half-humans in an MPAA lab, then signed by Chris Dodd afterwards.

MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd came out swinging Tuesday in the fight over pending Internet anti-piracy legislation calling online web sites and tech companies supporting the “Blackout Day” protest scheduled for Wednesday “irresponsible” and calling their protest action “a disservice to people who rely on them for information” or use their services.

“It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today,” said Dodd in a statement. “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

Yes, Markos already hit it. But I get to hit it again, under the This is So Stupid It Deserves Constant Mention rule. For starters: the sheer arrogance of the statement. That's not accidental, that is how the entertainment industry trade groups present themselves in nearly every situation. If a Girl Scout goes up to the head of the MPAA, she won't get away again until she hears how her very existence is only allowed because the big corporate studios make it possible, and that the color green is a copyright infringement, and that selling cookies is prohibited because cookies are a form of entertainment and fuck you, little girl, for thinking you could do that without handing over a large cut of the profits.

The sole argument Dodd has here is this, and I'm not kidding: You, internet websites, are engaged in an "abuse of power" by taking down your own websites. Only the MPAA gets to decide when to take down your websites. So shut up.

That's what the whole law is about: giving the largest entertainment companies themselves the right to preemptively shut down any effing website they want, under  unproven claims of "infringement", and leaving it to the poor pisser on the other side to try to prove their innocence in court battles after the fact. And why shouldn't they try for that? We are for the most part there already, after all; Congress has steadily been ceding government authority and mandating court deference to private industries over and over again, so getting it over with and just letting a top handful of companies preemptively decide who they think might be breaking the law, then giving them heightened government-assisted abilities to destroy the "offender" in question before actually having to prove their case—well, that seems like a logical next step, doesn't it? The true genius of it, however, is the added bonus of being able to threaten any internet site that even has a link to the supposed offender, or that allows users to post content that is not properly pre-censored to remove "potential" copyright claims according to whatever guessed criteria these companies later come up with. If the MPAA decides you haven't been taking explicit steps to "confirm" that no users or commenters are posting things it deems naughty, that's it: you're shut down as well. That's the real kicker, the call for preemptive, universal monitoring of all posted internet content. Forget the technical incompetence of the bill; the intent and logic alone is a megacorporate fantasy come to life. Preemptive shutdowns! Seizing assets! A required level of user policing that is objectively impossible for most sites to reasonably meet (including, hilariously, the sites of the MPAA-belonging, SOPA-supporting studios themselves, you unrelenting dipshits), thereby ensuring a rich and unending stream of new criminals!

You can practically hear the condescension dripping from Dodd's statement, the outrage that these silly internet companies are still able to express themselves in any way at all, if that expression comes in a form that might slightly inconvenience Sony, or Disney, or whatever other entertainment mega-corporation wants the power to literally police the entire structure of the internet in the name of their supposed corporate rights.

Oh, I think we're all for reducing piracy. As shown by their unwillingness to just change their flawed and asinine bill already, however, the MPAA, like the music industry, is not quite so narrowly targeted on that. Their more pressing concern has of late been how to continue to squeeze top profits out of a distribution model that increasingly does not need them, and doesn't want them, and which revolves around bleeding content producers and consumers both, and that, in turn, requires tight control over every other possible means of alternate distribution (see: Net Neutrality, the fight over whether or not many of these same companies should be able to charge you a steeper fee if you get your content from "discouraged" sources, i.e. competitors, critics, or anyone else who makes it onto their corporate blacklist).

If it were easier to buy content, people would do more of it (iTunes, etc., has begun to help in this regard for music, but the film and television industries will apparently have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the electronic age). If industry groups did not consistently and absurdly overstep in what they called "infringement," and so had a small bit more credibility in this debate, that would help too. While we're at it we can ponder on the Neverending Copyright Story, the constant battle to ensure that we treat corporate copyrights as infinite entities, more sacrosanct than the original artist-centric version ever was, because once again corporate giants of course deserve stronger protection than individual people. That's just natural.

Net Un-Neutrality, SOPA, PIPA and ever-expanding copyright laws; a ridiculous patent system; ALEC, the MPAA, the Keystone fight; the legal fights over fracking; the mere political existence of Mitt Romney: Every aspect of our current government is predicated on expanding corporate power, and if that power conflicts with deeper American principles than those other principles can piss off. Even while we celebrate the internet bringing concrete benefits to other nations, we seek to limit it at home because some group of lobbyists says that corporate profits demand it. Then we have to listen to those same corporate voices condemn us for having the rotten audacity to even object.

Sorry GOP: America Still Blames Bush For The Economic Mess

   They also say that our Congress is confused, inept, and basically worthless as far as the Republican side of the room is concerned.

   From latest news according to the Washington professionals:

A majority of Americans believe that former President George W. Bush is more responsible than President Obama for the current economic problems in the country, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said that Bush was more to blame while 29 percent put the blame on Obama; 9 percent said both men deserved blame while 6 percent said neither did. Among registered voters, the numbers are almost identical; 54 percent blame Bush, while 30 percent blame Obama.

Independents, widely considered the most critical voting bloc this fall, continue to blame Bush far more than Obama for the economic troubles. Fifty-seven percent of unaffiliated voters put the blame on the former Republican president, while 25 percent believe the blame rests more with Obama.

Heck, even one in five Republicans say Bush is more responsible than Obama for the state of the economy!

CBS/New York Times:

The public is not assigning blame equally between President Obama and Republicans in Congress for the partisan gridlock over key legislation.

In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, 60 percent say Mr. Obama is attempting to work with Congressional Republicans to try to accomplish something; 27 percent say Republicans in Congress are making the same effort to work things out with the president.

There is strong public support for politicians to start cooperating. At least 80 percent – regardless of party identification – say Republicans and Democrats should compromise some of their positions in order to get things done.

    Another Republican talking-point bites the dust.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Blackout Got you Down? Coming attractions for the NEW internet!

Originally posted to detroitmechworks on Tue Jan 17, 2012

Ok, so all your favorite websites are down today.  It's no big deal!

Yes folks, the corporations of America have stepped up to the plate, and are ready to provide you with alternate sites that do ALMOST exactly what your old sites did. 

Of course, there is a nominal registration fee for accessing each and every one of the following sites, but that is simply the cost of getting what you want!

Follow me across the flip, and your journey into the FUTURE of the internet will begin!

Missing Wikipedia?  No problem!  We present the new and improved Weekpedia!  
No longer will you be forced to sit through erroneous and constantly updated information by random people on the internet!  The new Weekpedia is written and controlled by the top experts in the field.  Each entry is scrupulously scanned for copyright violations, and then, given that wonderful professional polish!
-Who needs comprehensive information on Gibraltar, when you can see a LIVE performance of the newest pop sensation! Each article will have a learning machine that determines what YOU most likely will want to see!  Don't like her?  Don't worry!  We've got a hundred more lined up for you!  And if you DO need that information, we will happily link you to the 1901 copyright free Encyclopedia Britannica article.  After all, Nothing's really changed as far as the Rock goes.  And SPEAKING of the Rock, you'll want to see his NEW MOVIE!

Want up to date political Commentary like on DailyKos?  Well, buckle up because the new and improved MSNBC site has you covered!  No longer will you need to surf the internet for progressive stories when you can simply go to our site and see the important news right there!  No more hassles of trolls and voting.  Our editors have determined what you NEED to see and where you NEED to go to get it.  Want to comment?  Just send us your comments and we'll determine if they fit the story!  You'll see comments from people JUST LIKE YOU!   And if you are worried about not seeing the controversy, don't worry!  We have linked our site to the former members of Redstate, so you will be sure to see ALL sides of complex isssues.  It's only through fair and balanced coverage that you will get the whole story!

Want Videos like you used to see on Youtube?  No problem!  Welcome to USTube!  The net's new site for user created videos.  By uploading your video, you ensure that you are helping this vibrant community stay strong.  Our editors will review all content, after doing a quick check against the MPAA and RIAA catalogs to ensure compliance.  If you are using a licensed song, the royalty fee can be deducted automatically, provided that the use of the music is approved by the copyright holder.  No more worrying about fair use or possibly violating a film copyright either!  We simply will replace all violations with random public domain films from the early fifties, ensuring entertainment and compliance.

Want to go shopping?  Well, the NEW internet has you covered!  Almost every corporation will have a website, and the new instant charges to your bank account will ensure that you buy the products you want in a fraction of the time.  No more worrying about con artists trying to rip you off.  If it isn't verified, it WON'T be sold. 

Want to chat with your friends on Facebook and Twitter?  Well, we've got a surprise for you!  The new Faceplace ensures that everyone is EXACTLY who they say they are.  Once you've uploaded all of your information, you can be sure that there will be nothing posted to your wall that could be hurtful in any way, because it will all be checked.  No violations of copyright also means we can ensure that everyone plays by the rules.  Uploading a picture?  We'll check it to make certain you aren't breaking any laws.  That way we protect both you AND your community.

And for added security, the new internet will helpfully monitor your hard drive for all media.  By doing this, we can ensure that you aren't doing anything that could get you into trouble.  Real time monitoring will ensure no pirated films or software have been placed onto your computer, through NO fault of your own of course.  We'll make certain that stuff is GONE.  Of course, refusal to accede to this monitoring IS a violation of the terms of service of the new internet.

So don't worry.  You'll still be able to shop, talk and do all of your productivity!  Just with a little bonus.   A friend who is going to be watching over you.  A Big Brother, if you will.

He's got your best interests at heart, after all.

Christians, Rick Santorum, and Voter Fraud

    Sometimes those so-called “ Christian Conservatives  “ can be downright amusing.

Accusations of voter fraud fly among Christian conservatives after Rick Santorum endorsement

Originally posted to Laura Clawson on Mon Jan 16, 2012

The gathering of Christian conservative leaders intended to choose a not-Romney to unify behind (a little late in the game to have much effect) has dissolved into recriminations:

But in back-and-forth emails, Protestant fundamentalist leaders who attended – most of them backing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the anti-Romney candidate — are accusing Catholic participants of conniving to rig the vote.

They said they were conned into leaving after the second ballot on Saturday. They said pro-Santorum participants held a third ballot which Mr. Santorum won with more than 70 percent of the vote — far higher than the nine-vote margin he won on the first ballot. [...]

Now, a prominent evangelical political organizer is saying to others confidentially he has evidence that in a least one instance a participant was seen writing Mr. Santorum’s name on four separate ballots and putting them in the ballot box.

This is a nice little twist on the Republican obsession with voter fraud. But is it evidence that they're obsessed with fraud because they're so likely to commit it? Or just that their obsession leads them to be suspicious of anyone who disagrees with them, even an elite group of their peers?

No word on whether the voter ID requirement involved knowing a set number of Bible verses.

Also republished by Daily Kos.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Mitten Romney: Stimulus Lies

   Another Christian candidate who has to resort to lies in an effort to look better than he actually is.

Romney's Big Lie on the Economy Gets Bigger

Originally posted to Avenging Angel on Mon Jan 16, 2012

If nothing else, Mitt Romney seems dedicated to proving that repetition of a lie will make it true.  On no point is Romney's tilting against the windmill of truth more comically pathetic than his long-ago debunked claim that President Obama "did not cause this recession, but he made it worse."  After a tidal wave of fact-checkers demolished his mythology last summer, Romney on June 30 pretended, "I didn't say that things are worse" before reinstating the falsehood in his stump speech just days later.  Now, Mitt has a new twist on his "Obama made it worse" fraud, declaring in light of the improving economic outlook that "It's getting better not because of him, it's in spite of him and what he's done."

Sadly for the myth-maker from Massachusetts, the numbers and the overwhelming consensus of economists - including John McCain's 2008 brain trust - demand Mitt Romney give credit where credit is due.

That, of course, is something the serial deceiver Romney is refusing to do, even as he acknowledges the economy is improving.  As Mitt put it in New Hampshire ten days ago:

"I'm sure the president will want to take credit for it, for any improvement. Guess what? He doesn't deserve it."

Two days later during a GOP debate, Romney repackaged his con job this way:

"The president is going to try and take responsibility for things getting better. You know, it's like the rooster taking responsibility for the sunrise. He didn't do it," Romney said. "In fact, what he did was make things harder for America to get going again."

But back on planet Earth where the force of gravity still applies and the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Romney's slander should receive the ridicule it rightly deserves.

This summer, Time blasted Romney's accusation that "the recession is deeper because of our President," concluding "that Romney's claim has no credible basis" because "there's no credible economic data showing that Obama has inflamed our economic problems."  As Greg Sargent noted on June 27, both the AP and the Washington Post's own fact-checker demolished Romney's talking point on the recession which the NBER declared over in June 2009.  Confronted three days later by NBC producer Sue Kroll about the growing economy, modest job gains and surging stock market, Romney simply denied he ever made the charge:

"I didn't say that things are worse...What I said was that economy hasn't turned around."

Nevertheless, just four days later Romney marked Independence Day by returning to his lie.  As the New York Times reported:

Speaking at the annual July Fourth parade here on Monday, Mr. Romney told a crowd of supporters and passersby, "the recession is deeper because of our president," adding, "it's seen an anemic recovery because of our president."

Mr. Romney made a similar assertion earlier when reporters had pressed him on the point near the parade staging grounds, after initially seeming to limit his commentary to the president's handling of the recovery, which he said, "has been slower and more painful,'' But then he went ahead and said it, that the president "made the recession worse."

As it turns out, it's not just the tidal wave of reporters and fact-checkers that washed away the mud Mitt Romney hurled at President Obama on the economy.  A bevy of economists, including ones who worked for Romney endorser John McCain, long ago concluded that Barack Obama saved the U.S. economy from calamity.

6709557243_82a0f6de4c_z

Take, for example, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.  Despite Republican mythmaking that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) "created zero jobs," in November the CBO reported that the stimulus added up to 2.4 million jobs and boosted GDP by as much as 1.9 points in the previous quarter.  As The Hill explained, the CBO has found that "President Obama's 2009 stimulus package continues to benefit the struggling economy":

The agency said the measure raised gross domestic product by between 0.3 and 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011, which ended Sept. 30. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that GDP in that quarter was only 2 percent total...

By CBO's numbers, the $800 billion stimulus added up to 0.9 million jobs in 2009, 3.3 million jobs in 2010 and 2.6 million jobs in 2011.

Mark Zandi, an adviser to John McCain in 2008, was adamant on positive role of the stimulus. Federal intervention, he and Princeton economist Alan Blinder argued in August 2010, literally saved the United States from a second Great Depression. In "How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End," Blinder and Zandi's models confirmed the impact of the Obama recovery program and concluded that "laissez faire was not an option":

The effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 3.4%, holding the unemployment rate about 1½ percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls. These estimates of the fiscal impact are broadly consistent with those made by the CBO and the Obama administration.

But their modeling also suggests that the totality of federal efforts to rescue the banking system dating back to the fall of 2008 prevented a catastrophic collapse:

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0. For example, we estimate that, without the government's response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

Even Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the CBO and chief economic adviser to John McCain during the 2008 election, acknowledged the impact of the stimulus. Certainly no fan of either Barack Obama or the design of the ARRA, Holtz-Eakin told Ezra Klein that:

"The argument that the stimulus had zero impact and we shouldn't have done it is intellectually dishonest or wrong. If you throw a trillion dollars at the economy it has an impact, and we needed to do something."

Of course, Mitt Romney is nothing if not intellectual dishonest.  But his lie that President Obama "made the economy worse" has become, as Greg Sargent noted, "has now become absolutely central to his campaign message, yet it's finding its way into story after story and segment after segment with no rebuttal whatsoever."  And until that deception is finally buried by the scorn and disdain it deserves, Mitt Romney's "Post-Truth Campaign" will continue until November.

* Crossposted at Perrspectves *

Also republished by Community Spotlight.

Where We Are Headed if Republicans Get Their Way with the Tax Code

Originally posted to Tim DeLaney on Mon Jan 16, 2012

The current Republican candidates have all called for the elimination of both capital gains taxes and estate taxes. Presumably, taxes on dividends would also be eliminated, but even if not, there are ways of diverting profits from dividend payments to capital gains--stock buy-backs, for instance.

Below the fold, we will examine the likely consequences of adopting this Republican vision of taxation. Briefly put, it ain't pretty.

Let's imagine you are a CEO or other high-placed executive for a major corporation. Your annual salary--including bonuses--is about $5 million. You are getting more wealthy each year because you don't spend the whole $4 million in after tax dollars. (You have a very good accountant!)

The Republicans gain control of the White House, and of both houses. (Hurray! Let the good times roll!) True to their word, they cut the capital gains tax to zero and eliminate the estate tax. You and your accountants, with an eye toward the 0% tax on capital gains, decide that your salary ought to be structured such that it is classified as capital gains rather than ordinary income.

Somehow, under the magic of creative accounting, and perhaps with an assist from the lawmakers you helped elect with your Super Pac, most of your income is transformed into capital gains. With an effective tax rate near 0%, your net worth skyrockets.

So, what do you do with the money? Even today, the top 1% in wealth own more than half the financial assets in the country. Under the new tax regime, this inexorably increases until--perhaps a few decades from now--they own nearly all the stocks, bonds, and other financial assets. What now?

A natural outlet for all that capital is property. So you start buying up houses on the open market to use as rental properties. The 99% can no longer afford home ownership because you have squeezed the last available dollar out of them. Eventually, most workers are reduced to living from paycheck to paycheck. What do you do when you con no longer get blood from a stone?

You resort to cannibalism, of course. If you are one of the top 0.01%, you start squeezing out the other 0.99%. eventually, and it might take a few generations, all the country's wealth will be concentrated in a few thousand families. (Remember, we abolished estate taxes.) Under the Republican paradigm, the trend is inevitable: the rich will inevitably get richer, and the rest will get poorer.

It may already be too late to reverse the trend. Excess wealth can readily be converted to votes, especially in view of the Citizens United decision. Votes are converted into control of the government, and this in turn is converted to control of the country's wealth. In this circular paradigm, wealth begets wealth. When wealth and politics combine, the non-wealthy are the losers.

For the United States--and all its citizens--to prosper, we need to attain political equilibrium. The politics of the Democratic Party naturally tend towards equilibrium; the politics of the Republicans naturally tend towards runaway wealth concentration.

I don't by any stretch mean to suggest that everything proposed by Democrats is naturally and necessarily optimum policy. We can, and have, made mistakes. But when Democrats make mistakes, those mistakes tend to be self-correcting. When Republicans make mistakes, the results are generally catastrophic.

What does this have to do with the current campaign? First priority, in my opinion, is to overturn the Citizens United decision by means of a constitutional amendment. Demand from every congressional candidate--Democrat or Republican--a firm commitment to the proposed amendment. The alternative is to allow corporations to buy the government. In reality, this amounts to allowing the Boards of directors and the CEO's to buy the government. It is merely a convenient fiction to believe that the shareholders are in control.

There are other reforms needed. In future diaries, perhaps I will try to advocate for some of them.

Also republished by J Town, Dream Menders, and Community Spotlight.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Saint Ron Paul’s Biblical Adventure

    While blazing through the vast Internet universe, I came across one of the books of the Bible renamed  the “ Book of Saint Ron Paul.

More from the Book of Paul

by ontheleftcoast           Sat Jan 14, 2012

I had a bit of fun morphing the words of the Book of Mark into the rather bizarre, self-serving words of the Republican party's mad elf Ron Paul. My sig line was the result. So I took a shot at transcribing more of chapter 8 into the words of Adam Smith as misunderstood and taught by Saint Ron Paul.

[1] In those days the millionaires being very great, and having caviar to eat, Adam Smith called his disciples unto him, and said
[2] "I have compassion for the millionaires, because they have now been with me for many days, and have nothing but caviar to eat."
[3] "And if I send them away to their own mansions, they will faint on the way, for they lack carbohydrates and they came from afar."
[4] And his disciples answered him, "From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?"
[5] And he asked them, "How many loaves have ye?" And they said, "Seven."
[6] And he commanded the rich to sit down at the tables with fine linen: and he took the seven loaves, and the money collected to feed the poor, and paid for more loaves, and said, "The rich did pay more so should get more."

Editor's note, the following several verses are a rather boring account of various courses being served to all the guests. Those that couldn't pay were given vouchers for a meal at a later time at the soup kitchen. Back to the story.

[31] And he began to teach them, that he must suffer many things, that he would be rejected by the scholarly, and be replaced by better understanding of markets, but after 3 generations would rise again.
[32] And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.
[33] But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he took from Peter and gave it to Paul, saying, "Get thee behind me, Peter: for thou savorest not the things that be of gold, but the things that be of paper money."
[34] And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples, he said unto them, "Whosoever will follow me, let him pay for himself, pick up his own check, and he can join me."
[35] "For whosoever will put his life savings in stocks shall lose it; but whosoever shall put his life savings in gold, the same shall save it."
[36] "For what profit a man, if he gain the world, but has to pay taxes on it?"
[37] "For what shall a man demand in exchange for those taxes?"
[38] "Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and my words in this deficit spending and wasteful generation; of him shall I be ashamed when I return."

When money is your religion then you surely must follow the profits.

Originally posted to ontheleftcoast on Sat Jan 14, 2012
Also republished by Street Prophets and Community Spotlight.