Wrap Your Brain Around This One

By Keith R. Schmitz

How would anyone know the difference?

Tea parties targeted for disruption by anarchists?

Talk From the Hand

by folkbum

To me, the saddest thing about Sarah Palin's having written some cheat-sheet notes on her hand (video of her checking those notes here) is not that she did it at all, but, rather, that in doing so she screwed up her own already oversimplified message:

(originally, AP, blow-up via HP)
Her hand reads, "Energy/ Budget Tax Cuts/ Lift American Spirits." She couldn't even remember, in the moment pre-speech with Bic in hand, that the important cuts are tax cuts, not budget cuts.

You'd think for $100,000, the tea-partiers could have gotten someone who has their message memorized.

Who Speaks for Health Insurance Companies

By Keith R. Schmitz

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

There will be many contributors to this site who perhaps won't know why this is funny.

UPDATE -- The National Economic Council has come out with a report that lays out the numbers. From 1999 to 2009 premiums rose, depending upon state, from 88% to 148% (that would be Alaska). During the same period wages and inflation went up 38% and 28%. Bet middle class wages went up a lot less.

Could you imagine the screaming from the right if government spending went up that much?

Well, it didn't. According to the venerable Heritage Foundation, federal spending during that period went up 66%, with a huge role being played by the skyward increases in health insurance.

So why is it OK for that one sector in business be allowed to have an adverse affect on all the other businesses in this country? When are the right and right-leaning business groups going to give health insurance the same regard they give government?

A dollar spent is a dollar spent, no matter who gets their mitts on it.

Health Care Reform Has an Anthem

By Keith R. Schmitz



Dick I'll give a 92. It has a beat and you can dance to it.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

By Keith R. Schmitz

A tale from the "spontaneous" We Hate Obama Rally in DC

Lois Calzone from Maryland carried a poster showing Obama painted as Batman character "the Joker" with the captions "Un-American" and "cap and traitor."

"He is a traitor. He's either a Marxist or a Communist and we're not. He's totally un-American," Calzone told AFP.

"I think Saudi Arabia is behind him. Where did he get all that money to fund his campaign?" she said.

Her daughter, who refused to give her name, said: "The reason he hasn't picked a church in DC is because he's not Christian. He's Muslim.

"We were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt but this is too much."

Some in the crowd were there to try and engage those skeptical of the Obama administration.

Georgetown University law student Lindsay Windsor asked demonstrators to explain their opinions of the president.

"A lot of the slogans are very inflammatory and I want to understand what they actually mean," said Windsor, 22, who was wearing an Obama-Biden T-shirt, as she walked over to Calzone and her friends.

"I don't want to try to convince you that I'm right. I want to try to understand you. If we are going to fix our country's problems, we need to have a conversation together," Windsor said to the group of women.

"Obama is a sleeper cell... Go have a conversation with someone else," Calzone's daughter told her.

So, you too can be a sleeper cell.

Hey Big Spenders

Keith R. Schmitz

This week and since spring we have been entertained by the spectacular sight of angry white people taking the time to assemble in parks, capitol squares and town halls to rail, scream and threaten because of oh, a number of reasons. One of these that gets mentioned a lot is "all that government spending."

That spending, of course, by our current President.

We say, "ahem, where were you all when money, YOUR money, was being blown on Iraq, tax cuts for millionaires and drug 'reform' for seniors"...to the deaf.

Turns out that we were right. According to these calculations, 82% of our federal debt was racked up by GOP Presidents.

No one protests the right of people to protest, yell, scream, make derisive photo shops of their President, just so long as they know what the hell they are talking about.