Posturing for Greed

Good grief! They are gonna let it shut down yet and blame each other, and all for looking good for the election. The amount of money these two major parties are haggling over would not pay their wages  for a year, which by the way, will be uninterrupted in a shut down; it's everyone else that will suffer...the soldiers families, the DC employees in particular, our post office and lastly the retired. We are finally climbing out of a hole in spite of some not wanting Obama to win, and now all of them are going to stall the government and freak out Wall Street and the 401K's will suffer again.

As I mentioned, the money these clowns are arguing over is a pittance, yet they are bent. They are discussing mostly ideological programs and only because they can get under each other's skin with them and look good on paper. No one is discussing cuts from the federal gravy train. You know, oil, gas and mining companies paying a fair rate for federal land leases like the ski areas and ranchers do. Or, how 'bout closing the tax loopholes on corporations or making them at least pretend to pay their way? No, we are going to cut education and Head Start and things that keep kids off the streets and out of our overburdened jails. Oh, I forgot, they are starting to privatize prisons so they might just need inmates to keep the money coming.

In all seriousness, this is a joke and Americans ought to be ashamed of it. Like fools, we are often lining up behind "our guys" to play into this charade, but no one is winning but the legislators who have their hands out. I hate to say it, but we are to blame for a lot of this; every one of us. We have lavished in prosperity since the 1950's, paying little attention to what these milkers were doing and at the same time driving ourselves into personal debt to the point that we were paying the way for these big banks to deceive us. What were we thinking when our debt was being carried by credit card companies...how do you suppose they were covering it? By investing our real money in huge gambles and living off the interest of both.  The big fish always eats the smaller and the trophy fish are still swimming. Entitlement programs did not break this country.

The "Tea Party" had the right idea in that we should have had enough of this, but they got somewhat bogged down in frivolous topics and the notion that our country has just now been driven off a cliff. It is off the edge now for sure, but the very things that folks are coming to blows over have been going on now for a very long time; this did not start in 2008. I heard Michelle Bachman say tonight with absolutely zero shame: "When President Obama took over gas was a 1.80 a gallon. And food prices are going up....." So what is she implying, that oil has never been that high before? Hell, we paid over $4.00 a gallon four years ago to get our hay crop put up! Remember all those T. Boone Pickens natural gas ads? Food prices were expected to skyrocket this year and it is due to world happenings and corn being grown for fuel, it has little to do with anything in administration policy at least at this point.

Harry Reed tonight was talking so damn soft I wondered if he was in a library, but I did not have trouble hearing him say that it is all the Republicans fault. It is not all of any one side of the aisle holding this up. They are fighting over some of the most minuscule amounts of money; all fluff, posturing and preening to their party supporters. I do think that if the Pubs were not trying to lure the Tea Party supporters we would not be here on the door of a shutdown because the establishment know how to play this game. Likewise, I do not think that we would be seeing so much talk of entitlement monies, we would be talking about defense and Medicare that are the real drains on this economy. Do you know that these are the first conflicts in history that taxes have not been raised for? Health care will break this country if these guys don't first; that should be what we are dealing with. However, the entire next year will be spent on repealing "Obamacare", the budget ceiling and other big name things that don't amount to a hill of beans.

My point is: the blame has to stop and it stops with us! As Mike O'Neal said the other day, "We are in this together." It has been my experience in life that the one who continues to turn up the soil is the one who has something to cover, but by and large there is no single rose in this garden of thorns, and there is need for some serious pruning. The idea that my guy is better than your guy is foolish and it is going to be the undoing of this country.

Do I have my druthers when it comes to politics? Sure, but I don't see the need to dummy down or get all fluffed up just to win. That my friends is what they are doing in D.C. and we need to send them a message that we are not going to take the infighting especially since the winners do not share the spoils. They need a message that we are together in seeing this country great and we do not buy into them taking from us. As my hubby says: "This is Robin Hood in reverse."

This stuff they are pulling now is simply posturing to satisfy the companies, churches, unions, and the wealthy in general who fund their campaign bankrolls so they can vote policy for them again. They all tell lies about each other, some more than others for sure, but tales nonetheless because they are greedy. We have to stop buying into that! One of the folks who keeps stirring the pot with white little fibs is a minister for God's sake; there is no shame when the door is open to the safe and no one is paying attention.