icarusancalion

My dear international friends,

Long have I labored (at least once or twice) to explain:

- US elections ("Yes, well we have to vote along party lines for the least objectionable candidate because splitting the party vote results in getting someone Very objectionable.")

- the death penalty ("but we don't even have a death penalty in my region! Yes, well, that's Texas for you.")

- gun control ("But it depends on where you live; in New York City, I think they've outlawed water pistols.")

- religious freedom ("Yes, supposedly we have a separation between church and state, but some areas just don't vote that way. Where my friend Andrea lives, she was told she shouldn't even have Buddhists praying for her.")

Now, Tufts University has managed, in one brief gun control article, to do the impossible.

They've EXPLAINED America.

http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in-arms.html



The country was settled in waves by very different groups of people. With different political philosophies and cultural attitudes.

If you like, you can consider that America has multiple personality disorder. First, check which America you're speaking to.

Occupy Wall Street is outperforming the Red Cross and FEMA in their response to hurricane Sandy. They've been fast, scarily competent, and flexible, and gone to the hardest hit areas FEMA has ignored.

They receive high praise, and in the hard hit areas like Rockaways, volunteers from Occupy are the only help they've seen. Occupy members say that they feel capitalism is broken, and so they've stepped up to attend to community needs.

I'm totally pro-Obama, you know that, but this disaster has disappeared too quickly from the news cycle. From what I've heard, I'm getting the sense that there's too much crowd control going on, and not enough help.

The word is that it's really bad up there. People have lost everything, absolutely everything, and in the rubble -- with no infrastructure even -- must somehow rebuild their lives from scratch.

Who would the candidates be in a zombie apocalypse?

Joe Biden would be the guy who raids the federal armory and kicks open the doors to the local supermarket, waving everyone in to take food while he stands guard. You know the one -- the first guy to figure out that the old rules don't apply.

President Obama would be the guy you find at the local church (that's been turned into a hospital). He's introduced as "the doc" and he's wearing an expensive blood-stained shirt as he directs people inside. Once the doors are re-barricaded, you discover he's a lawyer who retooled himself to fit the need of the moment when the first doctor got killed.

Mitt Romney's the smug socialite who, when the chips were down, shot his neighbors to make sure he himself would have enough food. Everyone is warned to stay away from his house, and folks have to wrestle with their consciences when the zombies head his way: do you warn the selfish bastard? Do you help him? He wouldn't help you.

Paul Ryan's the zombie. He's first guy who got killed. You watched him be a vicious boss, a liar, and an arrogant jerk. When he died you didn't regret it. But now he's a zombie and he's even worse.

Regarding President Obama. I always knew it would take more than one term to undo the damage of President Bush. I'm not naive.

I followed what Bush was doing. Two wars. Massive deregulation leading to total corruption (I'm looking at you, Cheney and Haliburton). No bid contracts--fundamentally cash giveaways. The insanity of cutting taxes while wildly spending on wars and unfunded drug benefits for seniors and NCLB. Jobs vanishing overseas and corporations paid to do it. Torture and extraordinary rendition. Stomping over the UN and military advice. The Patriot Act and total disregard for human rights. A staggering mess even before the recession. People don't realize, but most of the US economy fell into a recession around 2005. The housing bubble hid the fact that every other area of our economy, aside from housing, had floundered because of outsourcing.

Now we have a solid indicator of economic improvement, according the conservative Brookings Institute: the return of US manufacturing, mostly the auto industry and peripheral businesses.

That's Obama's doing. And the government is making money on the deal.

This pushes us away from what caused the recession in the first place--and again, those credit swaps merely triggered the collapse of an artificial housing bubble, revealing the weak foundations beyond.

We wanted overnight change. We got slow, solid change.

We wanted a crusading hero. We got a pragmatic diplomat.

I knew when I watched his inauguration parade, saw the troops parade by him, that he would be a military president. Maybe it was his respect for those soldiers. I knew those would be his successes. I wasn't surprised by the death of Osama Bin Laden and the end of our involvement in Iraq.

I worried about that 2008 slogan, "Hope." Heartening. And when we hope, we're capable of more: everything goes better. But "Hope" also made him a blank screen for people to project their own hopes and dreams, no matter how varied and disparate. And sure enough, the Democrats wanted it all, yesterday, and pulled in a million different directions. That slogan didn't bring the Democrats together on a single agenda. His goals, like the closing of Guantanamo Bay for example, were undermined by the defection of Democrats who *hoped* he would to accomplish *their* projected dreams.

It's time to vote for the real Obama.

- The fiscally cautious man who can build a stimulus bill while making so many tiny little cuts, he offsets a third of its cost -- and yet not a soul complains about those cuts.

- The president who listens to the advice of his military advisers and takes bold, decisive action.

- The president who's willing to seize the opportunity to pass health care, even knowing the Republicans would wreak revenge.

- The dignified diplomat who represents us with such credit throughout the world, I feel proud to see him step off of Air Force One.

- He's a man who comes from where we're from, with student loans, a beater car, and junky college furniture.

He's one of us.

Factcheck.org is completely non-partisan.

Here is what the folks there call their worst nightmare: Former President Bill Clinton’s stem-winding nomination speech was a fact-checker’s nightmare: lots of effort required to run down his many statistics and factual claims, producing little for us to write about.

Republicans will find plenty of Clinton’s scorching opinions objectionable. But with few exceptions, we found his stats checked out.

:)

Who raised the deficit? Hmm... let's see....

The whoppers at the GOP

My personal favorite is Ryan shedding tears about the poor -- while the infamous Ryan budget ruthlessly cut programs for the poor.

Ryan proposed cuts to food stamps, vouchers instead of Medicare coverage for seniors, ruthless cuts to social security for future generations, eliminated job training programs, federal lunch programs for kids, Head Start for kindergarteners.

His plan would take money from the poor and give it to the rich while increasing the budget deficit (per economist Paul Krugman). Romney would pay only 1% of his income in taxes under Ryan's budget, because Ryan plans to eliminate all taxes to capital gains and dividends.

Yep. We want to be sure to help all those poor people with stock portfolios.

Posing for the cameras, Ryan says that "it's the responsibility of the strong to care for the weak"?

How does he define "care"? As in "I care for burgers, but I don't care for sushi"? I have this image of a vulture, perched and drooling.

I'm floored Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Either Romney has abandoned the plan to court the middle class, or he thinks we're stupid, and hopes we'll just listen to the ads (and FOX).

Has Romney heard of the internet?

Ten things about Paul Ryan:

A Republican friend asked me what Obama had done for me personally. Oh, there's a quite a list.

But let's start with my student loan and Obama's student loan reform.


Obama is for students.

A former college professor, President Obama has done a great deal to make college more affordable. He ended rapacious student loan practices. He made more Pell grants available, both freeing up funds for college students and freeing up jobs for adults during this rough period. He cut student loan interest rates in half, lowering them from 6.8% to 3.4%.

His student loan reforms cap loan payments to 10% of your income.

http://www.good.is/post/what-do-obama-s-student-loan-reforms-mean-for-you/

How has this helped me? As someone working but underemployed (I'm tutoring part-time) I was able to reduce my student loan payments to an amount I can afford.


(Note that the Republicans voted to raise student loans back to 6.8%. If you're a student, don't vote Republican.)