three examples of republican america

Three otherwise unrelated bits today redolent of modern day Republicanism. First, the report that one in four working families are low-wage, according to Working Poor Families Project, based on Census Bureau data. And people are working long hours for low wages - "an average of 2,552 hours per year in 2006, the equivalent of almost one and a quarter full-time workers per family." Indicative of the family-unfriendly Republican slant against workers in favor of investors and employers...

Second, when asked what John McCain could do to turn his campaign around, former Speaker of the House and bomb-thrower in chief Newt Gingrich said

McCain has to focus on the Reid-Pelosi-Obama machine and the threats they pose to most Americans: Nancy Pelosi's call for "harsh measures"; the Democrats' proposal Monday to abolish 401(k) plans; the plan to strip Americans of the right to vote in a secret-ballot election before being coerced into joining a union; the tax increase on the investors who are needed to regrow the stock market and retirement plans, and their likely flight from American investments; the use of tax money to pay the liberal group ACORN, which is engaged in massive voter fraud in its registration drives in multiple states; the close ties Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, and Barney Frank have to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and the trillion-dollar spending increase in the Obama campaign promises. If McCain can make these facts stick, he can get back into the race.

The problem with Newt's "facts" is that they are all lies. Nobody is going to force people to join unions. ACORN collects voter registrations - some of which are inacccurate, but that is NOT "voter fraud" (voter fraud is what the Republicans do). Obama's ties to Fannie Mae are grotesquely exaggerated - and in any case Republicans are equally closely tied to the two. As for the tax increase on "the investors who are needed to regrow the stock market and retirement plans", would those be the same god-damn geniuses who got Wall Street and now Main Street into the mess it is in now? This is 21st Century Republicanism, of which Newt Gingrich is one of the fathers - lies and innuendos rather than addressing real problems because partisanship and winning power trumps all else.

And finally, this little story about how the CIA finally got in writing permission from the de facto Bush White House to torture people. They are torturing people in the name of the United States of America, the bright light, the beacon, the land of the free and home of the brave. And it is the fault of Republicans.

The above, and many more reasons, are why we should all vote for Barack Obama in November. Even if you don't like anything about him (although personally I find a great deal about him that I do like), he has the tremendous advantage of being None of the Above. We can't take more of this.