Titanic Post

Vote Harry Teague for New Mexico Congressional District 2!

All you need to know about John McCain: The Briefing Book

Courtesy of the AFL-CIO NOW Blog.

It amazes me to hear what I assume to be working class people working hard for their money calling other working class people “whiners” when they speak up in outrage over getting the shaft from giant corporations who can’t cover their losses for high-rate loans they made to low income people caught up in our tanking economy.

Fanny May and Freddie Mac are sub-prime lenders of money to high-risk people who would not otherwise be able to qualify for a loan to buy a house. They were originally funded by the government so that they could cover eventual losses due to the fluctuating market and to the risk involved. This is called “welfare,” corporate welfare. I also think it was a good idea to give poor families the opportunity to buy a home and to start accumulating wealth.

Now Fanny May and Freddie Mac are whining to the government to bail them out, because they were too shortsighted to put enough money aside, even with the high interest rates they charged their customers. Instead they pocketed the profits and underfunded their coverage.

If the government is brash enough to bail them out, as they invariably do with bank and oil companies that are in trouble, the profits are privatized by the rich corporations and the losses are socialized and handed down to the taxpayer.

Instead of complaining about poor people who are rightly complaining about their crappy situation, you should all be outraged at our government for screwing us all to the benefit of the rich. Karl Rove is an evil man and a criminal who should be imprisoned.

Nicholson

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

It took just eight decades but H.L. Mencken’s astute prediction on the future course of American presidential politics and the electorate’s taste in candidates came true:

On July 26, 1920, the acerbic and cranky scribe wrote in The Baltimore Sun: ” . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” (more…)

Published on Sunday, May 4, 2008 by PBS.org

by Bill Moyers

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, “Who’s telling the truth over there?” “Everyone, he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.” That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical,” one viewer wrote. A “nut case,” said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist. Many black preachers I’ve known - scholarly, smart, and gentle in person - uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I’ve known many white preachers like that, too. (more…)